MrBeast Talks Beast Games Season 2 and how he built his YouTube empire
Jimmy Donaldson, known as MrBeast, has almost become synonymous with YouTube. With almost 460 million subscribers, MrBeast has the largest following on the platform. Last year, he launched his reality competition series, Beast Games, on Prime Video. With the show's second season about to premiere, Donaldson sat down with Mashable's Executive Producer, Mark Stetson, to discuss his rise to stardom, how he built his YouTube empire, and what we can all expect from the new season of Beast Games.
Early in his career, Donaldson saw the value in leaning into YouTube as the main outlet for his content. "Right now, 2 percent of humanity's time is spent on YouTube. When I was 11 years old, I didn't know YouTube would grow this big. Accident? Yes. The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was I fell in love with making YouTube videos. Over the last 16 years, certain mediums have died and YouTube has grown exponentially. I got very lucky that the thing I fell in love with, that I devoted my life to, happens to be growing endlessly."
Donaldson has grown his love of making videos into a major content empire. Not only does he have the most subscribed channel on Youtube, he is also the third most-followed creator on TikTok. Jimmy has launched multiple brands, founded non-profits, and now has his own reality competition series on Prime Video.
The second season of Beast Games premiered on Jan. 7, with a hundred of the world's smartest people versus a hundred of the word's strongest people battling for a $5 million prize. The show set multiple Guinness World Records such as: the largest physical cash prize on set ($5 million) and the most money won in a single episode of a competitive reality TV show ($2.02 million).
One major adjustment Donaldson was passionate about implementing between seasons of Beast Games was to focus more on the emotional drama contestants were facing between challenges. "A lot of people wanted to know the contestants more. In season 2, the first three episodes, there are a lot of shots in the city where it's just them hanging out. It's the contestants being normal. Which is funny because we have all this footage of these big, multi-million dollar sets, doing these crazy things. People aren't asking me to build more giants sets. They are not asking me to do more crazy games. They're actually asking for, in between those, just show the contestants talking."
Donaldson has built his career on creating experiences people have never seen on screen. Even when Donaldson was starting out, at the young age of 11 years old, he wanted to do things no one else has done. "That's always been my goal: to make content you can't find anywhere else. If someone else has done it and you're just slightly making it different than it doesn't feel as special. But if every video we make, you can't find anywhere else in the world, that's stuff people notice. And I think that's why we get the views we get and why people really resonate with the videos." Donaldson feels a responsibility to his audience to deliver on that ethos.
"I feel like I owe it to the audience to try to always mix it up and give them something they've never seen."
The first three episodes of Beast Games Season 2 are currently streaming on Prime Video. The following episodes will be released weekly on Wednesdays.