In February 2025, YouTube turned 20. The video site has gone through a lot over the past two decades, including an acquisition, an earnings glow-up, and multiple generations of star creators. In our 20 Years of YouTube series, we’ll examine the uploads, trends, and influencers that have defined the world’s favorite video site — one year at a time. Click here for a full archive of the series.
Though the phenomenon of video game speedrunning dates back to the Super Nintendo days, it arguably reached its peak in the early 2020s. Amid a flurry of COVID-related lockdowns and shelter-in-place orders, viewership skyrocketed on speedrunning streams, and annual events like Awesome Games Done Quick set donation records by collecting more than $3 million at some of its individual events.
If you read the headline before you started reading, you’re probably wondering what the speedrunning phenomenon has to do with MrBeast. Simply put, between Jimmy Donaldson‘s first brush with viral fame and his Squid Game-inspired apex, he turned the journey from aspiring creator to YouTube star into a speedrun — and as he is wont to do, he set a record in that category that has yet to be broken.
Subscribe for daily Tubefilter Top Stories
Videos began showing up on the MrBeast channel in 2012, though the creator’s early efforts are mostly notable for how different they are when compared to Donaldson’s current output. MrBeast as we know him didn’t exist until 2017, when Donaldson earned his first encounter with viral fame. By recording himself as he counted up to 100,000, Donaldson produced a sleeper hit that has since picked up more than 32 million views.
It was at that moment that the MrBeast speedrun began, and the North Carolina-based entertainer advanced from leaps and bounds from there. In 2018, his “subscribe to PewDiePie” billboard earned him his first coverage in Tubefilter (sorry we missed the counting video, Jimmy.) Later that year, the videos we now know as signature MrBeast fare — large-scale competitions featuring round-number prize money sums — took off.
By 2019, he had signed with management company Night and carved out a recurring role at the digital media conference VidSummit. His view counts moved into ten-digit territory, and the #TeamTrees campaign underscored the generosity and charitable spirit that has since become a driving force on the MrBeast channel.
And so, by 2021, just four years after his breakout, Donaldson was in position to produce what is arguably the biggest blockbuster in YouTube history. His take on Squid Game (albeit with much less murder than the original version) needed just four days to get 100 million views. No non-music video has ever made it to nine digits faster. How’s that for a speedrun?
YouTube eventually named the MrBeast Squid Game remake as its top trending video of 2021. Bolstered by his big-money spectacles, Donaldson raked in $54 million that year, though he’s always quick to point out that he reinvests most of his earnings in his productions.
It’s been nearly four years since the Squid Game remake (where does the time go?) Over that period, MrBeast has maintained his position as YouTube’s biggest draw. His unprecedented rise has upended the industry we know now as the creator economy. Influencers are earning more than ever before, and they are diversifying their revenue by getting active in fields like investing, creator products, and brand partnerships. In all of those areas, Donaldson has set the pace.
But before he could advance YouTube into the future, Donaldson had to experience its past and present, and that’s where our speedrunning metaphor comes back into the story. Before becoming famous, the man now known as MrBeast was a student of YouTube who studied the platform’s content and stars religiously.
As he embarked on his own creative journey, he seemed to synthesize all of his learnings on a single channel. The grand scale of his videos evoked forerunners like Dude Perfect, who went as big as possible in search of world records. His combative nature and eventual clashes with management can be compared to the volatile career of the man who MrBeast asked us to subscribe to. Donaldson’s enhancements to the visual language of YouTube hearkened back to previous groundbreakers like Casey Neistat, and his uncompromising attitude made him as big of a lightning rod as Logan Paul.
In other words, this was not merely an “any%” speedrun. Donaldson conquered all of YouTube by becoming all of YouTube, before continuing on to venture into theretofore-uncharted territory.
Before MrBeast, the history of YouTube unfolded in a straight line. Early innovators like Smosh and Ryan Higa passed the torch to international stars like PewDiePie and Psy, who were themselves usurped by Vine- and TikTok-raised upstarts like the Paul brothers.
Donaldson, however, is YouTube’s final boss. His videomaking style pushed the platform to its limit, creating masterstrokes like the Squid Game remake that remain unparalleled in terms of their size, scope, and impact. He proved that by being a student of YouTube, he could achieve heights that were once thought to be unreachable. Once upon a time, one million subscribers was a notable benchmark. The MrBeast channel now has more than 430 million subscribers, and in the time it took me to write this sentence, a few more fans added themselves to that tally.
The MrBeast channel is the biggest creator showcase YouTube has ever hosted, but the titular host isn’t perfect. His rapid rise has earned him regular callouts and criticisms, and he’s endured his share of contentious legal battles, too. It wouldn’t be right, however, if the ultimate YouTube creator was a goody-two-shoes. Since its inception, the Google-owned platform has served as a home for artists who are eager to push boundries, and that’s what Donaldson does, even when the results start to get messy.
You can feel however you want about him, and he certainly has his share of both lovers and haters, but no matter what you think about him, there’s no denying that the MrBeast brand is here to stay, and like the winner of Squid Game‘s first season, no one can knock him off his pedestal.
