- The video discusses the growth of a YouTuber named Jimmy, who now has over 260 million followers.
- Jimmy's team has grown to include around 80 to 100 full-time employees across his various companies.
- He has built multiple studios in Greenville, North Carolina, and plans to expand further.
- The video highlights the challenges of creating large-scale videos, including the need for space and resources.
- Jimmy has spent over $4 million on a single video and plans to spend millions more on upcoming projects, such as a cruise ship competition and a recreation of Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory.

- The speaker bought a chocolate factory and had to find the right size within their budget.
- They are mapping out the redesign of the factory to resemble Willy Wonka's factory.
- Brand deals have increased significantly for the speaker, offsetting the cost of the factory.
- Brands are now more empowering and open to collaboration with content creators.
- The speaker believes that YouTube offers more value for brand advertising compared to traditional media.
- The speaker advises new creators to focus on making good quality videos that people want to watch.
- They emphasize the importance of retention in video content and suggest improving the beginning of videos to retain more viewers.

- The first 30 seconds of a video are crucial for retaining viewers.
- A 15% difference in viewership can make a significant impact on video success.
- The importance of strategic intros and hooking viewers.
- Continuous learning and improvement in video content is essential.
- The creator discusses branching out into different channels, such as gaming, reacts, and philanthropy.
- The success of Team Trees and Team Seas campaigns shows the power of influencers and viewer engagement in supporting charitable causes.
- The creator emphasizes the need for creators to take the initiative in promoting charitable projects.
- The potential for the creator economy to broaden the middle class of creators and allow for diverse expression in different genres.

- The speaker discusses the success of Team Trees and the importance of involving smaller creators.
- They express excitement about the potential for future projects and trends in the YouTube community.
- The speaker mentions the need for new waves of creators and platforms to keep the industry from becoming stale.
- They discuss the challenges and limitations of TikTok's creator fund and the dominance of YouTube in terms of revenue sharing.
- The speaker expresses a willingness to explore new platforms if they offer better monetization options for creators.

- The speaker believes that there should be more investment in platforms like YouTube to support creators financially.
- They mention that TikTok and Instagram currently have more brand collaborations due to their quick execution and ease of use.
- The speaker suggests that if a platform like TikTok can figure out how to monetize and make it easier for creators to earn money, it could disrupt the space and become a vulnerability for YouTube.
- They discuss the importance of creators on platforms like YouTube and Instagram, stating that a majority of the views come from content created by creators.
- The speaker speculates that YouTube may introduce revenue sharing on their Shorts feature before TikTok does, based on Google's experience with advertising and revenue sharing.
- They mention the potential for live streaming to generate significant revenue, citing examples from China where billions of dollars were made through live streaming sales.
- The speaker expresses curiosity about the number of concurrent viewers and other details of these successful live streams.
- They discuss the potential for live streaming to become more popular in the West and question which platform will emerge as the winner in live streaming.

- The speaker discusses the need for a more streamlined checkout process on YouTube for purchasing merchandise.
- They suggest a 1-tap checkout system that saves payment and shipping information for easy purchasing.
- The speaker mentions the success of creators with their own subscription platforms, and considers creating their own platform for exclusive content.
- They discuss the potential impact of their content creation speed and high production value on the entertainment industry.
- The speaker talks about their experience working with traditional production crews and highlights the advantages of their non-scripted format.
- They mention their ambitious project of terraforming an island for a video, discussing the challenges and costs involved.

- The video discusses the growth of a YouTuber named Jimmy, who has over 260 million followers and a team of 80 to 100 employees.
- Jimmy has built multiple studios and plans to expand further.
- He has spent millions on videos and has upcoming projects based on a cruise ship competition and Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory.
- The speaker bought a chocolate factory and is redesigning it to resemble Willy Wonka's factory.
- Brand deals have increased for the speaker, and brands are more open to collaborating with content creators.
- YouTube offers more value for brand advertising compared to traditional media.
- The speaker advises creators to focus on making quality videos and improving retention.
- They discuss branching out into different channels, such as gaming and philanthropy.
- The success of Team Trees and Team Seas campaigns shows the power of influencers and viewer engagement in supporting charitable causes.
- The creator economy has the potential to broaden the middle class of creators and allow for diverse expression.
- The speaker discusses the challenges and limitations of TikTok's creator fund and the dominance of YouTube in revenue sharing.
- They express a willingness to explore new platforms if they offer better monetization options.
- The speaker suggests that if TikTok can figure out monetization, it could disrupt YouTube.
- They discuss the importance of creators on platforms like YouTube and Instagram.
- The potential for revenue sharing on YouTube's Shorts feature and the popularity of live streaming are mentioned.
- The speaker discusses the need for a streamlined checkout process on YouTube and the success of creators with their own subscription platforms.
- They mention their experience working with traditional production crews and their ambitious project of terraforming an island for a video.

- The speaker discusses the idea of buying an island and creating a beach rather than buying an island with a pre-existing beach.
- They mention their excitement about the launch of their brand, Feastables, in retail stores.
- The speaker believes that their brand will be successful because it offers a unique and high-quality product that appeals to a specific audience.
- They express their admiration for creators such as PewDiePie, Logan Paul, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk, who inspire them with their work ethic and dedication to creating great products.
- The speaker shares their goal of making as much money as possible in order to give it all away and help others.
- They conclude by expressing their belief that the speaker's work will be remembered for over a century and will change the entertainment industry.

The speaker discusses buying an island and creating a beach, talks about their brand Feastables launching in retail stores, admires creators like PewDiePie and Elon Musk, and shares their goal of making money to help others. They believe their work will be remembered and change the entertainment industry.

Jimmy "MrBeast" Donaldson returns to Creative Disruption after 2 years to share updates about his life, his videos, and the creator community at large. With over 200M YouTube subscribers, multiple successful businesses including MrBeast Burger and Feastables, and a team of 100+ employees, MrBeast is doing it all. As one of the most innovative and generous creators on the planet, MrBeast has an incredible conversation with Ricky Ray Butler about his aspirations, motivations, and plans looking forward. #mrbeast

Creative Disruption Podcast with Ricky Ray Butler. Insights and stories from leading creators, writers, producers and marketers on how the worlds of advertising, entertainment, and data science are converging.

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Corridor Digital’s Jake Watson 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vgaHAaYo6k&t=14s

Hacksmith Industries on How to Keep Innovating
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSVdOeBT01I&t=7s


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Youtube Influencers:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLS2Zwkpbko_70E40eAvzlB68QfkJzNqXo

Creators Disrupting Entertainment:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLS2Zwkpbko_68QGQRb_cIYkILdD5DN-1Q

#CreativeDisruption

You think your videos are good, but they suck.

The sooner you learn how to make good, great videos that people actually want to watch, the sooner you'll get views.

My name is Ricky and welcome back to Creative Disruption.

A lot has happened, Jimmy, since you've been on, you know, what was it, like 2 years ago, a little over 2 years?

Before this, we were looking, I came on here, it felt like 10 years ago, but apparently I came on here February 20th, 2020.

And it's pretty crazy how much stuff has changed since then.

Well I think just our dialogue together has changed significantly because you were exploding at that point.

You know people already considered you the goat of YouTube but today you know you're way bigger than you were 2 years ago.

I think 2 years ago you were close to just a little over 10% of the size that you are collectively across your followers today, which is, I believe, over like 260 million followers.

We have like 205 on YouTube and then yeah probably another hundred on everything else.

And you know it's 1 of those things where you know I remember ask you the amount of employees you had and you said oh around a dozen and some contractors.

Well, I mean the thing is certain videos like, you know, when we recreated squid game, like that video alone, we had like 150 Or no, we had 130 just like construction contractors, over 200 people worked on that video.

we, we pull in a lot of people and even things like there's a lot of jobs that like, I might not own the merch company I work with, but still that supplies tons of jobs.

And this thing I do supplies tons of jobs.

So there's also a lot of inadvertent jobs, but actual full-time people is probably somewhere between 80, 100 across like all their MrBeast companies.

And are most of those employees in Greenville?

Well, actually, I've never had anyone ask me that.

So our gaming channel is almost all remote and that has like probably like 25 different people.

Our reaction channel is all remote except for like 1 or 2 people and there's like a dozen plus people.

I think, you know, we've chatted before where I was very impressed with certain YouTubers a couple years ago of having a bunch of employees, you know, having their own little studios, but Going to North Carolina and checking out all the stuff that you're building just blew my mind It literally Greenville, North Carolina is turning into a I guess small Hollywood You know, so to speak I think If you I hope you don't mind me I mean mentioning this but there's 1 studio that has like 40,000 square feet.

And there's another new studio that you're already starting to use that has like over 65,000, 68,000 square feet.

Yeah, that's what I, cause I'm a big fan of Steve Jobs.

And so, yeah, we're building tons of studio space there because which I probably said this same thing 2 years ago But 1 of the biggest bottlenecks for creating large-scale videos is just space, you know, I don't you wouldn't think that you know, it's And I think a lot of YouTubers as they're scaling up and more people want to be like us and do these big projects, they're going to realize like, if you want to upload, let's just say you want to upload every week, you know, and these big videos take months to create, we'll just be conservative and say like 2 and a half months.

That means like for you to upload next week, you had just been working on that video 2 and a half months ago and all these other videos.

So you basically have to be working on like 7 or 8 videos at a time.

And if 1 video takes up, you know, which most creators, most creators don't even have a warehouse.

Let's assume you have 1 warehouse And 1 of those videos takes up that entire warehouse, how do you work on the other 7 videos?

Like if you do world's hardest maze and you build a maze in your warehouse, you still have 7 other videos you got to work on so you can upload the next 7 months.

And so space becomes a bottleneck really quickly as these projects get bigger and bigger and bigger.

And sometimes it's not an entire video that or 1 video that takes up your whole studio, but you know, 2 or 3 of them still, like the point is you got to be working on many videos at the same time to be able to upload every week or some people try to upload twice a week and it just, yeah, that, so that's where we are.

And so we have like 3 or 4 different studios currently, and we're always building more because weirdly enough, space is a bigger bottleneck than you'd think.

So it's going to become eventually, assuming we can remain relevant, we can just keep reinvesting going bigger and bigger.

I'd love to get more YouTubers around me.

I'd love to just make this giant fairytale campus of just content producing machine.

And even maybe have an incubator or places where other people can come in and film videos as well as more people come in locally.

Just the difference building our, like I said, Apple Park, my giant warehouse has made is insane because we can, you know, that thing, like you said, it's like 50,000 square feet of studio space and then like another 10, 20,000 of office space.

And with that studio space, we can just work on like 2 or 3 videos in there at the same time.

And 10 years from now, I'm not going to be surprised if you have your own Disneyland, to be frank.

The stuff that you're accomplishing, I think most creators don't even imagine accomplishing right now.

And I would say in addition to that, you know, very, you know, let's say, high functioning production companies that do, let's say, reality TV or unscripted, I don't think they, you know, even process the, I guess, the nut that you've cracked when it comes to logistics and operations, to have all these projects happening at this level at the same time, but to also have as quick of a gestation period where you have a quick turnaround, where you do something that takes a lot of resources, a lot of people, and you turn around in just a month or 2 months.

People underestimate how hard this stuff is.

Yeah, I mean, you keep going, but yeah, it's more difficult than people think.

Well, How do you keep pushing those boundaries?

Because it feels like every year it gets more and more intense and more and more complicated.

And I remember in our last podcast, you mentioned that 1 day you would hope you would have videos that cost more than a million.

You mentioned Squid Games where you had like 200 people on that.

Did I really say that in the last podcast?

You know, actually, I used to say that all the time.

People used to be like, when I was spending like $100,000 a video, people would be like, so you know this isn't sustainable.

And I was like, I remember telling people, I was like, no, there's going to be a day where I'm spending over a million dollars a video.

They're like, no way you could ever sustainably like every video spend a million dollars.

Oh my gosh, you're giving me so many flashbacks to that.

It's amazing to see what you've accomplished in that area.

A million dollars is like a cheap video at this point for us.

The Squid Game video was supposed to be $2 million.

And then it's like, oh, you're writing it.

And then all of a sudden, it's $3 million.

We want to give all the contestants $1,000 for competing.

And then it goes a couple of days longer.

And a lot of people don't know if they can stay.

And yeah, it ended up being a little over $4 million.

And most, for all the people that are listening, most production companies don't get that for a single episode on Netflix or a major streaming platform.

That's amazing to see that YouTube, which is still a young platform, is generating talent that is figuring out how to push boundaries.

And well, our video I'm filming in a couple of days is like, so I got a cruise ship, which is not cheap.

We're putting 100 random subscribers on it, because I'm about to hit 100 million subscribers.

So they'll celebrate 100 million subscribers, got a cruise ship, putting 100 subscribers on it, I'm taking them on the cruise ship to a private island, and they're competing for the private island, and the winner gets the private island.

And so like that video, you know, between the cruise ship, getting them out there.

I mean, it's like 200 person crew that we're bringing out there to the, you know, because you got the hundred subscribers, you got to have backups, you got to have medics, our production crew, editing, dozen camera people, my talent, me, the boys, PA, like, it's like crazy, all that.

Plus we got to fly them all out to the island and all this stuff it's like it's gonna be like 3.5 to 3.8 million dollars for just my 100 million subscriber video and So it's like those big budget videos are becoming way more common.

Like, and then the video we're filming right after that is we are recreating Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory in real life, which I think is phenomenal.

You know, because we launched our chocolate bar Feastables and that that sold like crazy.

And we put like 10 mystery tickets in 10 different bars We're flying them out and they're competing for a chocolate factory And that 1 I'm not as in the weeds on that video But I know it's it's minimums gonna be like 2000000 dollars probably much more because we had to buy a chocolate factory and currently They're in there just renovating it and like you just doing I don't even know how to explain it.

So what went into this buying this chocolate factory?

Yeah, so we got a factory and then it took forever because we had to find the right size factory.

There's some that are more vertical, some of that are more sideways, obviously.

And we found 1 that I was like, yeah, this is within the budget.

Obviously, if I had unlimited money, I could have gone and bought a $20 million factory or warehouse and it would have been crazy, but I have some type of constraints.

So it was really finding something that I could buy for a million dollars and then just renovate as opposed to buying something like that's 5 to 10000000.

We're like, okay, here's where the chocolate river should go.

Here's how we're going to redesign the outside.

So it looks like Willy Wonka and all this stuff.

And, but 1 of the bits we're making like the world's largest can of Coca-Cola.

But yeah, they're they're getting pretty crazy price wise.

But also like which I can't tell you how much I'm getting for brand deal, but Brand deals for us have just gone up so much year over year to levels where I never thought that we'd get this high.

And also just our views have gone up crazy where it's like, you know, a lot of these videos are going to get a hundred million views.

compared to like working with brands a couple of years ago.

How has the process evolved in a more positive way working with brands?

Have they become more empowering of the content that you're creating?

Well, they definitely are more like, hey, you know what you're doing.

You don't have to fully read off this script.

Like, here's the things we kind of want you to hit.

But you have more freedom, which has been great.

But also, the other thing is that just like more and more brands are just entering the space, which has been cool because it used to just be like, you know, the same companies over and over again.

I mean, you, you could list them better than me, but it's like, honey, sponsor a lot of people and like these other ones.

So you could probably list like on your 2 hands, like the, the companies that are spending like big bucks and you would see like across all these YouTubers and now it's just like, I don't know, we're getting hit from basically unlimited companies.

It's really more who do you wanna work with, you know, which is kind of cool.

And it's amazing that it's finally happening.

There's 700 billion being spent on media annually.

And a lot of that has obviously gone to more traditional media.

But this greater economy is so much bigger than, you know, traditional media is today like compared to like TV, like YouTube is.

the analogy you use all the time is like, sponsoring a YouTube video is not the same as buying a commercial and like, what's that have to do with the NFL?

Because the NFL, Tom Brady isn't pausing the game, looking at the camera and going, drink this soda.

I highly advise you drink this soda for 30 seconds straight.

Now you're getting an ad jammed in between a dozen other ads.

Why did you buy that when you could get equal, if not more viewership for way cheaper on YouTube?

And it's literally just a break in the video from the person that they feel a connection with.

And that's 1 of those things that avoid the 90% of people that skip ads and the 50% of people that have an ad blocker.

Which I think is just, I'd say it's the only form of collaborating with artists or content creators or advertising where the brand, the creator, and the audience are all happy with the end result.

If you do it the right way, where everyone reaches a consensus and everyone feels empowered, and then you're going to get higher conversions and higher viewership as a result of

And on top of that, you know, if they use that money to make the content even better, which they should, then it's just like a triple win-win.

Well, I think we're going to be seeing that 700 billion shifting over drastically in the next couple of years.

I think it's already organically happening, where you have limitless brands are already knocking on your door.

And brands are trying to figure out now, how do they change their processes?

How do they navigate working with hurting, let's say, creators or cats at scale?

Mr.Beast can take on all the brand deals.

I mean, just sponsor Mr.Beast, Mr.Beast Gaming, Beast Reacts.

You know, we've seen a huge amount of growth on TubeBuddy where when we first acquired TubeBuddy there was a little over 5 million users and now there's over 10 million users in just a year and a half, 4 years.

A lot of these creators are starting to just start their careers.

I'm assuming some are going to be growing up on YouTube like you did.

What advice would you give yourself, let's say, 7 years ago when you were starting out that could potentially help these millions of

you're gonna have to guide me in a direction because I could I could give infinite advice is the answer.

what are like the top 2 things that just come to mind that you wish you would have known 7 years ago?

And the sooner you learn how to make good, great videos that people actually want to watch, the sooner you'll get views, I think is the biggest takeaway.

Because when I was 14, I thought my videos were the best in the world They weren't they're terrible many people are making way better videos to me But I didn't think that and I think you know to be successful You kind of have a little have to have a little bit of that ego where you're like, you know My contents great you got to believe in it But also like if you have sub a thousand subscribers like there's a good probability your videos just suck.

And you need to make hundreds of videos, or 100 videos.

It depends on the difficulty of your videos.

Improve something every time, and just get to the point where they don't.

That's making great level videos consistently, time and time again, year in, year out, and they don't take off.

Usually, I don't know, the videos are just boring or the ideas are repetitive or it's something we've seen before but like I don't know like name 1 person who's doing original ideas giving it his all like they're very well edited great story great retention Great pacing, you know, boom boom boom consistently week after week for 2 years that didn't blow up.

Like I don't know, in my opinion it's pretty hard to find.

And so just that, when you make good content you'll blow up.

It's not the algorithm, it's not anything, it's just like most me and most people who are in my position, you just make terrible videos.

And that's okay, because you've got to make a bunch of videos and improve over time to be great.

Like, you don't just pick up a baseball and become an MLB level athlete within a year.

You know, it takes many, many, many years, and YouTube's kind of the same way.

Unless you're just like someone like Emma Chamberlain or Liza or these other people that just have phenomenal personalities and like then it's a little bit easier.

But for those of us who don't have the best personalities, it takes a while to develop that stuff.

Creative Disruption, you know, has had a hard go and how fast it's growing.

But I'm just leaning on my personality because I think, you know, me as a spring chicken, I'm doing a lot of good.

You got you had a Hacksmith on here and it got 150 million or 150 views.

I think this, I think the thing that it's falling short that both Daryl and I agreed on is that we never upload.

I'm thankful that you've agreed to be my personal coach and growing this channel.

And so I guess, you know, my question for you, the process will be refined over time as you keep optimizing and getting more and more aware of how things must improve.

What are you doing when you look at data?

How does looking at the data come into all of this?

Like, is there any personal advice that you have for

wouldn't be a Ricky talk if data wasn't brought up.

This guy's the biggest YouTube data nerd I've ever met.

So how am I using it to make educated decisions?

But see, I feel bad because I feel like anyone who's listening to this podcast and is so niche already knows retention, study the retention chart, and fix it.

I'm like, OK, how could I have done this better?

And then I'm like, all right, is the thumbnail as good as possible?

And besides that, that's mostly I mean, you can go into only more in depth.

But, you know, for me, That's those are really the only 2 things that this fly won't go away.

I0I got it I need to just determine whether or not a video is good It's like did people click it and did they watch it?

yeah, but like when it comes to retention That's obviously really important because I mean that that's pretty good.

You can go down, there's another fly apparently, infinite rabbit holes.

I mean, you know, everyone knows the basics, you hook people at the beginning, but we really should drill this home because like, if you look at any of your retention charts on any videos, you're losing like 30% of your viewers in the first 30 seconds.

And then hopefully if your videos don't suck, they level off.

But like, imagine if you only lost 15% of those viewers or 10%, you know, like the doing the number 1 thing is like retaining as many people as possible at the start.

Because like envision a chart where you lose 35% of your viewers in the first 30 seconds and then envision 1 where you only lose 20%.

That's 15% more people that are watching throughout the video than not.

And it's not like you made the whole video a bunch better.

You just had a more strategic intro that hooked them.

I'm struggling to put this into words and like to really impose how important that is.

But like that 15 percent difference in viewership really does make the difference between hypothetically like 2000000 views on a video and like 10 in my head.

And so, yeah, like hook the heck out of people, you know, assure them what they clicked on as a clickbait, get right into it and over deliver.

That's very consistent with, you know, our head of research in AI.

That team's been focusing on retention models, on figuring out, okay, how do you increase a view through rate, et cetera.

And they said that the first 10 seconds is extremely important on getting more people to watch the entire video.

When did the light bulb come off, turn on, where you realized, okay, in order to retain people, we need to do X, Y, and Z.

Is there an inflection point in your career?

You know, I've been doing this for 10 years, so I couldn't tell you if it was year 5 or year 8, but somewhere along the way, I realized it and then we've just been honing it and honing it for the last, you know, more hardcore the last like 4 or 5 years.

And it's just like, it's the thing, like, that's the beauty of YouTube is there's no such thing as perfection.

You can always learn, you can always improve, your videos can always be better.

Even here, where we're spending 3 to 4000000 dollars on some videos, and I have giant teams, and I've 10 years in researching this, and I have no life, and I still, like, learn stuff all the time.

You know, When I talk to my YouTube friends, they'll teach me things.

Even little things like having better lighting at the beginning is better for retention.

This guy, 1 of my friends, he went through and he mapped out all his intros where it was darker, like kind of dark, like he would film in a closet or somewhere where there wasn't as good lighting and compared them to videos where he had just phenomenal lighting, very evenly lit skin and bright.

And the ones with better lighting, there was a clear correlation that had less viewer drop off.

Not everyone's phone's all turned all the way up or everyone has perfect vision or it's like fully paying attention.

The brighter colors just do grab you and grab your attention.

And that's something like, I'm just going to wake up 1 day and be like, you know what?

We're going to compare the brightness of our, the retention on our videos with intros that have dark intros to our videos with bright.

It's like, no, like, that's not something I would've thought of, but it's like, that's, you know, I'm always learning things cause I just surround myself with freaking natures that just study the dumbest stuff and they just always teach me things.

And so that's kind of the beauty of YouTube, is there is no end game.

It's like, I'm about to hit 100 million subscribers, and I feel like we're just getting started.

There's going to be more iterations that come.

Yeah, most people would think, oh, 100 million's the goal, the end point.

I think 1 day people will have a billion subscribers.

And even then, whoever hits a billion first, their videos could still be way better because there's no such thing as a perfect video and That's kind of the beauty of it.

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MrBeast is back! Channel Updates, Creator Tips, And His Plans For The Future.