MrBeast says to stop using his editing style (because he did, too)

Back in September, MrBeast gave fellow creators some advice: to stop using the ultra-edited, uncanny valley, eyes-wide mouth-agape thumbnail style he himself popularized.

Now he has more advice: they should stop using his quick-cut editing style, too.

“This past year i’ve slowed down our videos, focused on story telling, let scenes breathe, yelled less, more personality, longer videos, etc,” he tweeted Mar. 3. “And our views have skyrocketed!”

“My fellow YouTubers lets get rid of the ultra fast paced/overstim era of content,” he added. “It doesn’t even work.”

He cited his latest video, I Survived 7 Days In An Abandoned City, as an example of his slower style. We decided to put that video up against a video from March 2023, I Paid A Real Assassin To Try To Kill Me. We watched one minute of content from around the midpoint of each video and counted the number of cuts made between shots.

The results? In MrBeast’s older video, there were 38 cuts in 60 seconds. In his abandoned city video, there were just 23 cuts. Those cuts were noticeably longer, with lingering, zoomed-out shots of surroundings and of MrBeast + squad speaking to one another at normal non-shouting volumes.

As for the effect this change in style has had on his views, there are, of course, a multitude of factors affecting viewership and channel growth on YouTube, so we can’t say for certain that this is the reason for “skyrocketed” views. But we can say (using data from our Gospel Stats) that the average number of views MrBeast’s long-form videos bring in their first 90 days on the platform has risen from around 60 million in August 2022 to 150 million now.

His abandoned city video has been up on YouTube for a little over 24 hours, and currently has 71 million views.