2025-06-27
35 分钟This is The Guardian. Why Mr. Beast is the World's Biggest YouTube Star,
written and read by Mark O'Connell.
Jimmy Donaldson,
the 27-year-old online content creator and entrepreneur known as Mr. Beast,
is by any reasonable metric one of the most popular entertainers on the planet.
His YouTube channel,
to which he posts his increasingly elaborate and expensively produced videos has 400 million subscribers,
more than the population of the United States of America and equivalent to the total number of native English speakers currently alive.
It's close to twice as many subscribers as Elon Musk has ex-followers and over 100 million more than Taylor Swift has Instagram followers.
And that number, 400 million,
does not account for the people who watch MrBeast's videos in passing.
or who are aware of his cultural presence because of their children,
or who just sort of know who he is but don't have any intricate awareness as to why he is famous.
That number is the number of people who have made the volitional move of clicking that subscribe button to ensure that they will a. not miss his latest videos and b. can be literally counted by potential advertisers as a more or less guaranteed audience.
One last fact.
before we move away from numbers and into more nebulous modes of consideration.
His 2024 Amazon Prime reality competition show, Beast Games,
in which 1000 contestants competed for $5 million, £3.7 million,
the largest cash prize in television history, reportedly cost $100 million to produce,
making it the most expensive unscripted show in history.