You don't make that much from ad revenue on YouTube. Even if you get 100 million views on a video with a 5$ RPM, it's only 500 grand. That's why we do things like Feastables to generate revenue on the back end. It's why we're able to do these big multi-million dollar videos and other people aren't.[27]
The beauty is creating the model where we turn around and we use that to sell products (a couple hundred million of that in a year). Then we use that to put back into the content.[27]
There's a lot of potential, and I hope it's me, but someone's going to figure out how to funnel social media traffic into a business that doesn't feel sell-outy. It's organic. They're going to do things that are nuts, things we couldn't even picture.[57]
No one's ever built a large audience on social media, maintained it for a decade and leveraged it to grow brands. I think we're at the beginning of that.[77]
The cost of making a main channel video continues to go up. In 2018, we were giving away ten thousand dollars a video. In 2020, it was probably a hundred thousand. In 2021, a cheap video for us was three to four hundred thousand dollars.[16]
The main channel videos kept getting more and more expensive and there's only so much money you can make off a single YouTube video. If I want to keep elevating how much I spend per video, I need income outside of the videos. I didn’t want to sell equity or take on debt, I own 100% of my channel, so I decided to build up other side channels.[57] I started MrBeast Gaming and Beast Reacts because those videos are cheaper and profitable, unlike my main channel.[53]
That allows me to do a video like our 100 million subscriber island video which we lost six million dollars on. But, between reacts and gaming for a couple months I can take all that money and do a big spectacle on the main channel that monetarily doesn't make any sense.[53]
Around 2021 is when we started Feastables. The videos were getting so big and they kept losing so much money, I needed to make money from somewhere.[102]
These things exist just to pump money into the main channel.[7]
Without these, I wouldn't have been able to keep making the main channel videos bigger. That’s why most people don’t do what I do—because a lot of videos just aren’t profitable.[4]
Usually I think things will cost less than they do. The ‘Giving Away a Private Island’ video ended up costing over a million dollars and it only made 600 grand. That was a 400,000 dollar L. I take L’s like that all the time but that's why I have these other things, so I can afford to.[4]
The beauty of a gaming channel is A—the content is a lot easier to do. It's just recording gaming videos for a few hours as opposed to months of setup and a week of recording on the main channel. And B—they're not expensive. I’ll go, "Oh the gaming channel made a million dollars this month, here's a million dollars to spend on videos next month on the main channel."[57]
Cheap videos on my gaming channel and reacts channel fund my main channel.[25]
I used to do videos where we donated to Twitch streamers. We have gaming-heavy humor and a lot of my viewers play video games, so starting a gaming channel was a no-brainer.[45] We basically apply what we do in real life to Minecraft. We’ve done videos where a thousand players battle another thousand, and we recreated Squid Game in Minecraft.[4]
We've managed to have one of the largest gaming channels and one of the largest reaction channels on YouTube.[4]
MrBeast Gaming is great but it has a cap. Not many gaming channels pull 300 million views a month but people like SSSniperWolf pull 600 million views a month with reactions.[16]
Obviously reacts is one of the largest verticals on YouTube. It's relatively easy.[45]
If your thumbnail looks like a reaction video, it won't do as well. The videos that thrive are the ones where they react to an alligator eating a person but the thumbnail is just an alligator swallowing someone.[54]
We react to the most viral stuff because if it went viral, clearly people like it. It might not be as analytical as it seems... One video we reacted to is "I strapped a GoPro to a fish." You don't need data to tell you that's fucking cool.[78]