Many people are ignoring some interesting aspects of Mr. Beasts business and instead are focusing on the content which is mostly attention grabbing, silly, ridiculous game show premises. The content isn't for me or likely many HNers but I see similarities with startups and his business model.
From watching a couple of interviews, things I've picked up - when his youtube videos were grossing $20-30k a month he started hiring people and said he hires about 1 person per month since then. He has a teams of accountants, editors, producers, etc. He decided early on to have videos translated but would hire premier voice actors in countries, like someone that voice acted Batman to do his voice. He has an obsessed culture of making the best videos. He built a huge studio and lives there.
I see many similarities to what I've read about startup founders and a growth mindset. If anything, there are some huge marketing lessons to be learned from how he runs his business. I would love to see an experienced interviewer with knowledge of the business world/startups interview him.
My kid made me listen to the whole joe rogan interview with him. It was very insightful. Maybe rogan isn't "an experienced interviewer with knowledge of the business world/startups" in some people's mind, but I thought he covered many issues well.
This was also an interesting and fun interview which I expected to skip over fairly quickly but ended up listening to in the entirety.
Some discussion over how you would lose something like 3% of viewers if somebody sneezed, went to the toilet, and so on.. Other things to avoid, like any signalling that the video is winding down will lose you a huge chunk of viewers instantly.
Yeah the interview I saw a clip out of he or a staffer stated that any mention of peeing would drop viewership.
I watch woodworking youtubers and a couple of them had a behind the scenes discussion about their channels and also came to the conclusion that any wind-down loses viewers and this affects a channel. The algorithms use metrics of how long someone watches so it makes sense to end abruptly rather than have 30-60s of wind down.
Mr Beast's team must have second by second analytics on every video to know what works, what doesn't for the types of videos they produce.
This is another great exemple of the YT algorithm making the experience of watching videos inferior in the name of profit and attention grabbing by the way.
The reason YT doesn’t want show to wind down is because it provides people with a nice and natural place to stop watching which is nice. The race towards shorter, easier, more catchy and relentless content is a race to the bottom making everyone dumber.
Watching TikTok for an hour is probably the most depressing experience I ever had when it comes to my general opinion of humanity. Yet I’m here commenting and I’m not convinced that it is a better use of my time than TikTok. Sometimes I wonder if what the internet has actually done to us was worth it.
On the one hand YouTube can tweak the algorithm at any time and stop rewarding sudden endings (anybody thinking of Michael Ellis? How about a sudden ending?)
On the other hand, think about what benefits the platform. Executing a sudden ending that leaves people engaged and ready to continue to watch, rather than a friendly sign-off that gives people permission to go about their day like a healthy human being?
YouTube inherently will be strongly motivated to keep people connected and watching, rather than happy or healthy. So it's got me wondering about sign-offs that might invoke this reality. I'll have other videos, the viewer is not guaranteed to go from mine to a MrBeast video. If I wanted to be cagey about it I could try to connect to another video of mine: I've seen this done by others.
It makes sense if you assume that YouTube will reward you for keeping the viewer from switching off, through and beyond the end of your video. You become complicit in an attention engine, with some known parameters: you are there to keep people watching. What you do isn't relevant. You could be helping or hurting them, whatever you like, so long as you keep people on YouTube, and whatever YouTube does for metrics or algorithms, you can be sure that keeping people tuned in is an existential need of theirs and you'll always be rewarded for directing people to more YouTube. of ANY kind. Doesn't have to be the latest MrBeast. If you can successfully direct people to any other video of your choice, yours or otherwise, that still counts.
>I would love to see an experienced interviewer with knowledge of the business world/startups interview him.
It doesn't fully match your requirements but Mr. Beast was on Joe Rogan a few months ago. A fantastic interview and they talk a lot about the stuff you mention (voice actors, hiring people, etc.)
Just this week he did a one hour interview with 'The iced coffee hour' (I think that's the name of the channel), and he goes really into details about his revenue streams, costs, his plans for the future etc. Really interesting
He mentioned that he pulls almost no revenue and reinvests the money he makes into the next video. He started off with a $10k sponsorship - and he just gave it all away to a homeless person. And this cycle just keeps getting bigger. So yes, very much a growth mindset.
From watching a couple of interviews, things I've picked up - when his youtube videos were grossing $20-30k a month he started hiring people and said he hires about 1 person per month since then. He has a teams of accountants, editors, producers, etc. He decided early on to have videos translated but would hire premier voice actors in countries, like someone that voice acted Batman to do his voice. He has an obsessed culture of making the best videos. He built a huge studio and lives there.
I see many similarities to what I've read about startup founders and a growth mindset. If anything, there are some huge marketing lessons to be learned from how he runs his business. I would love to see an experienced interviewer with knowledge of the business world/startups interview him.