Quote:
Originally Posted by Huggles
100%
According to my 8 year old, the two most famous people on the planet are Taylor Swift and Mr. Beast.
Mr. Beast came out of absolutely nowhere after he pulled stunts like saying a name 10,000 times or something over 24 hours, I forget, it was something whacky and dumb. His early "stunts" were weird challenges that weren't very interesting but the algorithm propped him up, big time.
I have never gone through his early content and actually tried to find where he blew up, but the guy became a massive star seemingly overnight. But quickly you can see that the production values behind his content were absolutely incredible, like he went from a nobody to having the ability to setup and do nearly anything, it just seemed a bit odd the idea that just some random dude could blow up so big, so quickly, and then seemingly achieve so much in such a short time without help from veterans at PR and staging stunts and events.
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He started uploading videos to YouTube in 2012 at age 13, mostly just gameplay videos of Minecraft and CoD. He uploaded 100s of videos and his channel grew slowly over the next few years. In 2015, he started deleting many of his older videos and pivoted to mostly making videos about other YouTubers and YouTube in general. That's when he started picking up steam and grew from ~2K subscribers at the start of the year to ~15K at the end of the year. Up to that point, he didn't appear regularly in his videos and stuck mostly to narration.
He started expanding his content in 2016, doing comedy skits, giving away $100 gift cards, etc. After hitting 100K subscribers that summer, he dropped out of university to focus on YouTube. That sounds like a lot but it really isn't; in a video he released around the 50K subs mark, he said he had done ~650K views and $900 in ad revenue the previous month.
His first true viral video was in early 2017 (5 years after he started on YouTube) which was the 24 hour long video where he counted to 100,000. That's when he really started blowing up, doing challenges (much less complex than what he does now) and larger cash giveaways. He hit 1M subscribers towards to end of 2017 and kept growing and getting crazier from there.
So all this to say that he was definitely not an overnight success out of nowhere. And the quality of his videos grew as his subscriber count and revenue grew. There's a clear difference in quality between his 2018/2019 stunts and his more recent stunts.
And before you ask - his rise in popularity coincided with a time in my life that I watched way too much YouTube so I'm pretty familiar with him and other YouTubers from that period.