Mr Beast is successful! He has over 400 million YouTube subscribers, and Beast Games cost $100 million to produce – making it the most expensive unscripted show in history. A recent long essay in the Guardian looked at why he is successful; and what his success says about the prevailing cultural environment.
His success is partly due to cultivating the art of making YouTube videos over the past 12 years. What he has understood is the power of big numbers: His first videos to cut through were endurance slogs like the 40 hour ‘I counted to 100,000’ or listening to Jake Paul’s rap song for 10 hours. Recently he has crafted new challenges which pivot around compelling numerical feats.
Mr Beast has increasingly layered emotion into the big numbers he inserts into his videos – why cure 1 person of blindness when you can cure 1000; why not spend $1,000,000 on lottery tickets; why not get 50 YouTubers to fight for $1,000,000. Big numbers are not boring, big numbers are cool, big numbers are exciting.
He also has increasingly got participants to complete endurance challenges for money. The connection his subjects have with money varies: in ‘$10,000 dollars every day you survive in a grocery store’ the participant (introduced as ‘this random guy’) ultimately becomes so deranged and sad that he ceases to care about the money; in Beast Games JC stiffs all the other players by taking too much money and sits on a bed surrounded by filthy lucre looking impossibly sad. Often it almost feels like a post-modern critique on the nature of money in today’s society.
The challenges Mr Beast concocts aren’t new, but attention Mr Beast has paid to how to produce attention grabbing content is where he stands out. A 36 page manual he gives to his employees makes it clear how committed he is to grabbing viewers’ attention. The first minute of any video is where viewers turn away, and that is why his content always offers and immediate assault on the senses. Each Beast video is designed to stop you clicking away; everything is about the dopamine pay-off – there is no room for the boredom of world-building and character depth – it’s all emotion – whether it is who gets the money or who gets saved there is ALWAYS big emotion.
As Mark O’Connell says in his Guardian essay, this is a parable for the way we live now. Mr Beast juxtaposes the precarious nature of life, with the chance that a fabulously wealthy and famous man might come and save the day. He also does it in a way that is all about moments that are hard to click away from as opposed to deep storytelling.
The number of views Mr Beast has accrued shows he is fantastic at creating popular content – he is a genius at it – however, as Mark O’Connell says he might not be the genius we want, or need, but as a reflection of our current culture he may well be the genius we deserve.
