Mr Beast, The Businessman
You might know MrBeast a.k.a. Jimmy Donaldson, from the YouTube channel with the former name. The guy and his team upload very outlandish videos, things like “$1 vs $250000 Vacation”, “Train vs Giant Pit” and even a game show-type video based on the hit show “Squid Game”.
He started his YouTube journey in 2012, and after a decade of him working on this day in and day out, has 175 million subscribers, only behind T-series overall and standing on top of the list for non-brand channels. But he’s also a very astute businessman, and he’s created a number of businesses using his network and the brand that he’s created around himself. So let’s look at them.
First of all, he obviously has money coming in from YouTube. According to data from socialblade.com, his earning for the year 2022 was easily more than $30 million from just YouTube, all thanks to billions of views from all his channels combined. His unprecedented popularity on the video-sharing platform has earned him partnerships and deals with a lot of brands, the most prominent ones being EA, Microsoft and CSGO Lotto.
Another way he’s capitalizing on his brand value is through merchandise sales. The MrBeast brand has a whole line of clothing, accessories and some other products. He’s very famously said that much of the income he generates goes back into the business and getting the videos better and better, and that’s translated into his popularity exploding over the years.
He also expanded into the food and beverage industry with a burger brand named “MrBeast Burger”. It is a ghost kitchen brand that started in late 2020 and now has around 1000 locations across continents. The brand is estimated to earn Jimmy in the millions every year.
Another brand he started in this industry was “Feastables”. This was his own chocolate bar brand and they got into a deal with Walmart to sell the bars offline. In 2022 itself, the brand was estimated to have generated more than $10 million in revenues.
He’s also dabbled in businesses in the gaming, crypto and fintech industries over the past few years. All of this tells us a few things about why he is where he is. One, unrelenting work. You wouldn’t have heard of MrBeast if he stopped innovating when he wasn’t the top dog in 4 or 5 years. Two, the power of personal brands in today’s world. As we have transitioned into more and more digitisation and there is a constant fight for your attention, he has constantly come up with captivating, and dare I say, weird ideas to keep up with the brand image he has been working on.
Three, investing in yourself. As I said above, much of Jimmy’s earnings are put back into his businesses. He could very easily sit back with his tens of millions, but he’s still working, and I think harder than ever. Four, identify and ride trends. You can see this clearly with his “Squid Game” video. The show was a global hit and creating a video based on that would have driven major audiences to his channel.
What more do you think there is to learn from MrBeast? Something we all can apply and grow with? Anyways, that’s it for this article. But you read more of my articles here. And do let me know if you want a specific topic covered. Subscribe for free to receive more posts like this every day!