Famously generous YouTuber MrBeast is also seeing generosity from his viewers. Generosity with their eyeballs, that is.
The creator, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, tweeted earlier this month letting folks know that every single video he’s uploaded to YouTube in the past year has netted at least 10 million views. And it’s true — all 76 videos he’s uploaded since Sept. 6, 2018, have brought at least 10M views, with the majority netting at least 20M. (And, if you set aside just a handful of videos that brought less than 10M, his hot streak stretches all the way back to October 2017, when he first hit it big with his video 2,256 Miles In One Uber Ride. That video now has 24.8M views.)
Every video I’ve uploaded in the last year has gotten over 10 million views.. thx bois 😮❤️
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— MrBeast (@MrBeastYT) September 9, 2019
For Donaldson, those views have equaled out to hundreds of thousands per month. In September 2018, he was hitting just over 100M views monthly. Now he’s at more than 300M — and climbing. August 2019 saw him bring in a whopping total of 395,933,979. And his average view count is increasing at almost the same rate. Back in September 2018, Donaldson’s channel was netting in and average of more than 10.4 million views per video. A year later he’s nearly doubled that number, bringing in over 21.2 million views per video for all videos uploaded within the past 90 days.
Average number of views per video for videos uploaded in the last 90 days.
It’s not hard to see why Donaldson’s videos are so popular. He’s known for cash-splashing stunts like buying an entire grocery store’s worth of food to donate to a food bank, buying out an entire car lot’s worth of cars and selling them for a few bucks to the first people who came looking to buy, and purchasing tens of thousands of dollars of wantable stuff like Xboxes and drones, only to sell them for $1 (or, sometimes, one cent) each to passersby. He’s also left tens of thousands of dollars in tips for waitresses, given friends thousands to spent within a certain amount of time, and spontaneously gifted his family members and friends’ family members with much-needed items like new cars.
But even in the videos where Donaldson doesn’t give thousands away, he’s still going big with wisely conceptualized viral catnip stunts of epic proportions. Recently, he combined one of YouTube’s biggest trends (spending 24 hours doing literally anything at all) and Area 51, spending 24 hours near the locked-down zone. (In case you’re somehow not aware, Area 51 recently became an internet sensation/an endless nightmare for the government after millions of people joined a Facebook event called ‘Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us,’ and a decent number of them actually showed up at the off-limits locale this past weekend.) That video has received 25M views to date. In another video, Donaldson appealed to YouTube’s nerdy side by seeing if 50,000 magnets could catch a cannonball (12M views). And in yet another recent vid, he wrangled a horde of boats to play a real-life version of board game Battleship (13M).
Of course, Donaldson also got in on another viral trend that majorly expanded his audience over the past year. Around this time last year, he officially threw his hat — and his money — in to support PewDiePie in his battle against T-Series for most-subscribed-to channel on YouTube. Donaldson pulled several stunts, like buying every billboard in his hometown (19M) and becoming a living ‘Subscribe to PewDiePie’ sign at the Super Bowl (20M).
Views aren’t the only thing Donaldson has seen skyrocket since he began uploading PewDiePie-themed stunts. He’s also more than doubled his subscriber count. When he made his billboard purchase video around a year ago, he was at a not unimpressive 10 million subscribers. Now, he’s at more than 24 million.
There’s no question that making content appealing to PewDiePie’s many fans and the folks who believe the top creator on YouTube should be a creator, not a company, was a big boost for his channel. (To be clear, though, we’re definitely not saying Donaldson’s PewDiePie videos are the sole reason for his success. His views and subscribers continue to climb, though he hasn’t done a PewDiePie video in months.)
As for whether that upward trend will continue, the enthusiastic responses to Donaldson’s tweet suggest his fans are in for the long haul.
