“Viral Philanthropy: How MrBeast Changed The World”
Every once in a while, someone comes along and demonstrates: what we understood as reality’s limitations were wrong. These individuals are the shepherds of humanity; steering us onto a path that their footsteps helped carve out.
On May 5th, 1954, the thought that anyone might run a mile in four minutes or less was a nonstarter. Runners had been trying in earnest since 1886. It seemed an impossibility. Not even the best athletes, training under the best coaches, could crack it. Put simply, the task was unconquerable.
Thankfully, no one thought to break the news to Roger Bannister. Perhaps they didn’t want to upset him. Whatever their reasons, one day later, May 6th, 1954, Roger ran a mile in 3:59.4 seconds at Oxford University’s Iffley Road Track. And that was just the start. Two months later, the record was broken again. Then, again after that. Nowadays, even high schoolers manage it.
Of course, none of the important variables have changed since 1886. Humans haven’t evolved longer, more agile legs. The mile hasn’t shrunk. And there’s still two-hundred-and-forty seconds to every four minutes. What changed was our understanding of what was possible. Roger Bannister carved out an updated version of reality — one where the sub-four-minute mile was achievable.
Similarly, MrBeast (Figure 1) has carved his own dent into reality. The twenty-four-year-old YouTuber has quickly amassed one of YouTube’s largest audiences; at the time of writing, only five million away from one hundred million subscribers. Key to this success was his tenacious approach to trial and error, which has resulted in him stumbling upon a whole new type of video content — the type of content we now recognise as ‘a MrBeast video’. After all, MrBeast didn’t begin his YouTube career making videos about banks giving away money for free; nor did he stumble upon the idea accidentally. It was the product of MrBeast’s approach to life and entrepreneurship. He started out small, filming content on his phone. After monetising that, he funnelled his earnings back into the channel and bought better equipment. This allowed him to make more professional looking content — which, in turn, generated revenue to pump back into the operation.
MrBeast treated this reinvestment strategy like a law of physics. In the same way all that goes up must come down, all that came into his bank went back out again. And this set the stage for MrBeast’s success. Very few people reinvest the entirety of their earnings back into their business or enterprise, and for good reason. It’s the exact opposite of what any financial advisor would tell you to do. They’d implore you to diversify your wealth, and to keep a bit on the side, just in case. After all, MrBeast’s reinvestment strategy didn’t guarantee success. Plenty of bygone YouTubers have spent their entire earnings, too, only to fall below the radar and lose everything. The fact is, you can’t be effective if your budget’s poorly-spent. And what MrBeast twigged before anybody else was the optimal allocation of his budget: giving it all away.
The idea came to him in June 2017, after receiving his first YouTube sponsorship deal of $10,000. Consumed by the mindset of, ‘what would make a good video?’, MrBeast realised that he could give the money away and film the response. After confirming with his sponsor that this was an appropriate use of the money, MrBeast recorded the first of such philanthropic videos, ‘Giving a Random Homeless Man $10,000’.
The general idea behind MrBeast’s videos have stayed much the same in subsequent years. They typically involve an exorbitant amount of money, almost always spent charitably — like the time he gives people $100,000 to quit their jobs; or his car dealership where every car is free. I’ll refer to this style of content as philanthropic virality since there aren’t any recognised definitions yet. By philanthropic virality, I mean content that is so preposterously generous that audiences can’t help but watch it. In catering exclusively to these videos, MrBeast’s YouTube channel became the infrastructure necessary for turning our views into donations: we watch — which is to say we donate through the accruement of our watch time’s associated ad revenue — and then we repeat the cycle by watching our previous donations spent charitably in more philanthropic content.
They say you spend money to make money, and, in MrBeast’s case, that couldn’t be truer. Forbes estimates that he netted ‘$54 million in 2021 — the most of any YouTuber ever’ (Brown, 2022). Not that the money stayed in his account for long, though. As always, it went straight back into his videos. And at this point in his career, it almost had to. In the decade-long journey since his channel’s inception back in 2012, MrBeast has come to mean more than just Jimmy Donaldson, the twenty-four-year-old we all think of as MrBeast. In reality, MrBeast incorporates Jimmy; his team; and the vision he has for the future. If he’d pocketed the $54 million from 2021, the cogs of his operation would have grounded to a halt. He’d have starved it of fuel. As a consequence of that, people would have grown tired of his channel, comparing it to how crazy it once was. There’s no way he’d be able to maintain the same annual income, meaning the scope of his content would diminish.
The good news is: this wouldn’t mean the end of philanthropic virality. In the event MrBeast actually stopped producing content, other YouTubers would rise to the surface and take his place. In fact, there are already innumerable creators plugging away at this, lest MrBeast retires, dies, or, worst of all, gets cancelled. The point is, as long as people have money, and a platform like YouTube fit for hosting videos, content creators will continue down this same road of altruism. All we needed was one man to pave the way and prove that such content was profitable.
YouTube’s been around since 2005, and there have always been people richer than MrBeast. Why, then, did it take twelve years before someone gave $10,000 to a homeless man? The truth is, there’s no clear answer to a question like that. It’d be like trying to explain why the lightbulb was invented in 1878, and not a couple of years earlier. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter when such an idea or thing was discovered. More important than that is the fact it was actually discovered.
Ideas like this are only unearthed through a relentless drive to innovate and improve upon each variable of one’s operation. It was only a matter of time before someone stumbled upon philanthropic virality; it just so happened that MrBeast was first to meet the several prerequisites needed for its discovery to be possible. While anyone could have happened upon the idea, it’s no real accident that MrBeast got there first. MrBeast has always been fast to adapt to the wants of his audience. Throughout the history of his YouTube channel, he’s exhausted countless styles of content; each one signifying just one iteration in his approach to trial and error. If you were to watch his back catalogue in chronological order, you’d witness the video equivalent of Rudolph Zallinger’s March of Progress (Figure 2), with each of the primate figures representing the incremental developments applied by MrBeast from video to video — resulting, eventually, in the philanthropic virality we know him for today.
But like man’s final form in March of Progress, it’s anyone’s guess where MrBeast’s content goes from here. Success hasn’t quenched his thirst for innovation. Rather than hash out the same tried and tested videos, MrBeast is perpetually tinkering with his formula. Take, for instance, his 2019 #TeamTrees venture. In celebrating the landmark of 20 million subscribers, MrBeast vowed to plant 20 million trees worldwide. While the operation is still ongoing, the expensive stunt demonstrated just how lucrative an idea like that could be. Not only did the endeavour draw donations from near-enough all of the top YouTubers, entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk, Susan Wojcicki, and Jack Dorsey contributed as well. With so many high-profile names attached to the project, the campaign advertised itself. Nowhere else was this clearer than in Discovery Channel’s documentary #TeamTrees, which, in essence, proved to be nothing more than one long — free — advert for MrBeast’s YouTube channel.
MrBeast proved that the world was more charitable than we thought. He’s popularised the act of giving, turning Samaritans into rock stars. By turning philanthropy into a spectacle, MrBeast made the act of charity frictionless. Few, if any, of MrBeast’s viewers will have stopped to think that their respective view helped raise the funds to purchase the forty cars gifted to his 40 millionth subscriber. That’s because YouTube’s ad system turned our attention into money, and MrBeast found the best way to spend it.
Bibliography
Brown, A., 2022. The Highest-Paid YouTube Stars: MrBeast, Jake Paul And Markiplier Score Massive Paydays. [online] Forbes. Available at: <https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2022/01/14/the-highest-paid-youtube-stars-mrbeast-jake-paul-and-markiplier-score-massive-paydays/?sh=1f7156081aa7> [Accessed 13 May 2022].
MrBeast, 2017. Giving A Random Homeless Man $10,000. [video] Available at: <
[Accessed 13 May 2022].
MrBeast, 2019. I Opened A Free Car Dealership. [video] Available at: <
[Accessed 13 May 2022].
MrBeast, 2020. I Gave My 40,000,000th Subscriber 40 Cars. [video] Available at: <
[Accessed 16 May 2022].
MrBeast, 2021. Offering People $100,000 To Quit Their Job. [video] Available at: <
[Accessed 13 May 2022].
Zallinger, R., 1965. March of Progress. [Oil on canvas].