How Mr Beast just proved Hollywood is making a mistake on youtubers.

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For those who don’t know, Mr Beast is one of the biggest Youtuber’s that is mainly just known for spending absurd amounts of money in his videos on feel good things.

Cleaning up the most polluted beach.
Donating thousands of toys for Christmas.
Feeding people on thanksgiving.

Most of which just funded off of his videos getting so many views.

He has 80 million subscribers on his main channel and has had 13.5 billion views, with the average video being about 15 minutes.

That puts him in a category, where he can make about $6,000 per million views.

Pre merchandise
Pre outside endorsements
Pre any other source of revenue.

His new stunt though was recreating the show Squid Game, which was Netflix most popular series getting 111 million views in 30 days.

He posted on TikTok, saying he’d make it happen in real life, if 5 million people liked the video.

20 million did

After that, he recreated the set, all the contest and offered the winner a $450,000 prize, while having losers get about $500,000 in prizes.

Total cost was 3.5 million.

Most of which was funded via merchandise, where he told people for a chance to compete, they needed to buy a shirt saying “Mr Beast Game”.

Which just to get an idea of youtubers merchandise revenue.

PewDiePie pulls in 6.8 million dollars a month on merchandise.
DudePerfect is 2.6 million a month.

Very likely, Beast broke even off just merchandise on this.
 
After that, he makes the video and 3 days in, the video has 100 million views.

It’ll likely by tomorrow surpass the 30 day total on Squid Game, just as a YouTube video.

The reason this is important is simple.

Dreamworks founder Jeffrey Katzenberg & eBay CEO Meg Whitman started Quibi together in 2020.

2 billion dollars raised and focused on short form videos, like the ones Mr Beast makes.

They had Reese Witherspoon, Idris Elba, Sophie Turner and tons of celebrities, doing short form shows.

They all flopped.

The only people they never actually asked to do a show were people already on YouTube and other platforms that were making money and getting millions of views.

Mr Beast even revealed in an interview he once went to Netflix, saying if he had a budget they’d give to shows, he can do a lot more.

He said there was zero interest at all.

It’s sort of this weird guard, where a lot of creators online are basically just from scratch building shows that get more views over major TV shows, but studios don’t see a huge value.
 
Something to really think on.