2025-08-29
37 分钟This is The Guardian.
Hi, my name's David Wolfe and I'm the editor of The Guardian Long Read.
Over the summer we'll be picking a few of our favourite pieces of the year so far and giving you a bit of background information about them.
So this week I've picked The Mozart of the Attention Economy,
Why MrBeast is the World's Biggest YouTube Star by Mark O'Connell.
One nice thing about being an editor is you can use the job to sometimes secretly fill holes in your own knowledge.
And in this case, for some reason,
I found that the YouTube algorithm was always serving me up videos from this guy, MrBeast.
I knew who MrBeast was.
He's the world's biggest YouTube content creator.
And I knew that he was occasionally a controversial figure.
But beyond that, I didn't know much about him,
and I never watched the videos that were constantly on my feed.
But it kept nagging at me.
Why is this guy so popular?
Why do all his videos have so many views?
And what does his popularity mean?
So I ended up contacting one of my favourite writers,
Mark O'Connell, to see if he wanted to answer these questions.
He replied to say that he did.