Beast mode
Jimmy Donaldson — aka MrBeast — has established an online multi-platform empire with nearly 200 million followers, planted ~25 million trees, given millions of dollars away, and even helped 1,000 blind people see again. He’s also 24 years old.
Donaldson was just 11 when he posted his first video on YouTube — an unspectacular clip of a niche videogame called Battle Pirates. While the video has since been taken down, Donaldson’s said that it garnered 20,000 views and got him “hooked from day one”, a humble start for a YouTuber who would go on to become the biggest creator on the platform a little over 10 years later.
Roaring success
The MrBeast channel has become a de facto home on the video-sharing site for cash-guzzling, often clickbaity content such as "I Paid A Real Assassin To Try To Kill Me" — and the internet cannot get enough.
Just 5 years ago, the MrBeast channel had accrued more than 4 million subscribers, a very respectable count that millions of YouTubers could only dream of achieving. But since then, Donaldson's channel has exploded, taking his sub count to more than 145 million today. Not to give Donaldson any new video ideas, but if those subscribers formed a nation, it would be the 9th most populous on Earth.
In a typical month his videos are watched more than a billion times (based on the average of the last 6 months), and he racked up an astounding 1.8 billion in December 2022 alone. That's taken the total for his channel to just shy of 25 billion — enough for about 3 views from every single person on Earth.
Remarkably, those figures are just for his main channel. Donaldson has built other huge offshoots under the Beast umbrella such as MrBeast Gaming (32m subs), Beast Reacts (22.3m), MrBeast 2 (21.1m), Beast Philanthropy (12.5m), and several dubbed channels with millions of subscribers from the international market too.
