25 BILLION
That is the number of views Mr Beast has when you combine all of his YouTube channel views.
The world’s population is hardly 8 billion. If you split up those 25 billion views to every person on this planet, that would mean each person, on earth, would watch more than 3 of his videos.
That is INSANE.
Quick word from our sponsor
“The metaverse could reach $5 trillion in value by 2030” McKinsey & Company
Metaproof is a media company covers the business of the metaverse. We write weekly industry-specific newsletters that inform you on how the metaverse and web3 will impact YOUR industry.
Metaproof Media, Entertainment, IP
Dont get left behind, join thousands of other business professionals who stay on the bleeding edge by subscribing to Metaproof.
Who is Mr Beast? Is he the world’s most famous musician? Is he the world’s most famous athlete? Movie star?? No, he is a YouTuber. He creates free videos online that anyone with internet can watch. No need to buy tickets to the game, concert, or movie, just have internet access and you can start watching Mr Beast videos.
Mr Beast’s Audience
Before explaining how he will become the wealthiest person on the planet, we have to first understand his audience and reach.
Here is a list of MrBeast YouTube channels and number of subscribers.
17 CHANNELS AND A QUARTER OF A BILLION SUBSCRIBERS
And what is so genius about this approach to content creation is that he is translating his videos into all the major languages.
He has every major language covered except for Mandarin, Bengali, and Indonesian. I bet Bengali and Indonesian are coming soon and there must be a bigger reason why Mandarin is not covered (maybe because YouTube is banned in China?).
In March of 2022, he posted this screenshot of the videos he uploaded for that month and how many views they had.
283 million views. in. a. single. month.
It gets crazier.
In December of 2022, he tweeted that roughly 1% of all humans on earth watch each one of his videos (1% of the world’s population is ~$79m people) AND he had the fastest growing YouTube + TikTok channels in the world.
The numbers here are staggering. They are actually hard to fathom. How can some 24 year old (oh ya I forgot to mention Mr Beast is freaking 24 years old!!!) from North Carolina, reach this many people in the world? It’s all due to the internet baby. The internet has created the most insane form of leverage that has ever been created. A single person can now be seen and heard by nearly everyone on the planet. This is what happens when you bring down the costs of communication and transmission of data to nearly $0.
Mr Beast’s Business Empire
That that we understand how gargantuan MrBeast’s audience is, now we have to understand how he makes money.
YouTube: The first source of income is from his YouTube channels. He receives money from YouTube ads and from companies that directly sponsor his videos. It is nearly impossible to get very accurate figures from this revenue but it is estimated between $5m-$15m per month.
Merch: Gotta have the merch. Every YouTuber, streamer, and influencer have a merch store and Mr Beast is no different. His store sells t-shirts, hats, sweatshirts, lanyards, keychains and other items like this. I could not find revenue figures from this business but I imagine it brings in multiple millions per year.
Translation business: Mr Beast has multiple YouTube channels in different languages. He has the teams and infrastructure to pull this off so what did he do? Well, turn it into a business of course! This translation business has become a service for other YouTubers to have their videos translated into multiple languages. I dont believe there is any public revenue figures for how much he is generating from this but I can see it becoming a serious moneymaker.
Burgers: In 2022, Mr Beast launched a chain of burger restaurants. How can someone immediately launch multiple restaurants at once? Well because these restaurants were operated as ghost kitchens, meaning a participating restaurant would create the burger in their kitchen and delivery it to you via a 3rd party delivery service. It’s an incredible opportunity because they are simply leveraging Mr Beasts name brand recognition but dont have to set up the restaurant location, hire the staff, store the food, cook the food, deliver the food, etc. As of today, there are 1,000 virtual locations and a single physical location in New Jersey. In terms of revenue, they have announced “Beast Burger has shared over $100 million in revenue with restaurants across America.” I am not exactly sure if that means Mr Beast Burger has generated >$100m or if the revenue that the operating restaurants have received from sales has generated>$100m in revenue. Hopefully, Mr Beast goes on a podcast soon and spills the beans.
Chocolate: In January 2022, Mr Beast announced Feastables, a company that creates chocolate bars called “Mr Beast bars.” Just like all of his businesses, these chocolate bars swept the world with the company, Feastables, reportedly generated more than $10m in the first few months of its launch.
Plans: Mr Beast has stated he is looking into launching a brand of cookies and mobile games. Cookies make sense because they are relatively cheap to make and can sell for a solid margin but in my opinion, mobile games makes a lot more sense. The initial cost of a mobile game can be minimal or substantial (depends on how in-depth you are trying to make the game) but after the game has been created it is effectively infinitely scaleable. You do not need to spend money to make a new copy. Just copy, paste, and done. So what’s better than that??
What should he sell? NFTs!
Mr Beast can take an unknown product, chocolate bars, a burger, etc, and overnight, turn it into one of the best-selling products in the world. That is incredible but he is targeting the wrong products. If you are selling something you want to sell whatever has the highest margin. Something that costs you $1 to make but you can sell for $100. Vitamins, cosmetics, luxury items, all have extremely high margins but arent exactly on brand for Mr Beast so what goods have the highest margins and also fit his brand? Mobile games make a lot of sense because you are selling digital goods but the ultimate products with the highest margins are non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
People tend to spend more on NFTs than other digital goods for a few reasons, which I will break down but to sum it up, NFTs turn super fans into ultra fans:
Ownership mentality: Once purchased, users actually own their NFTs. They can sell them, trade them, gift them, take a loan using the NFT as collateral, etc. They can do whatever they want with them just like when I buy sneakers, I can do whatever I want with them. This small shift from the concept of ownership turns super fans into ultra fans.
Financial incentive: As mentioned above, you can sell your NFTs just like you can sell your rare sneakers. The difference is really about market liquidity. Rare sneakers but be liquid but if someone buys them from you, you still have to get their address, put the sneakers into a box, go to the post office, etc. There are frictions around that transaction. NFTs by comparison are hyper liquid because they are built on blockchain financial rails which enables people to easily send value to each other over the internet. This increased liquidity means there are thriving NFT markets with people buying and selling stuff daily. So if you have a Mr Beast NFT the chances of you being able to sell that NFT when you want is pretty high and you might even be able to sell it for more than you bought it for. You as a fan suddenly have a financial incentive to support Mr Beast in the hopes that your NFT increase in value.
Community into cult: Let’s say Mr Beast released 10,000 special NFTs he said he will not be making anymore. Those NFTs would be highly sought-after items and everyone that held one would feel very special and cool. They would all say how great Mr Beast is because yes they are fans but they also have a financial incentive to do so because their NFTs might increase in value. In addition to that, maybe these NFTs allowed you access to a special discord server where only NFT holders could enter. Everyone in that server would be singing the praises of Mr Beast and treating him like a demigod. Again, turning your average super fan into an ultra fan.
Accessibility: Digital goods are exceptionally easy to send to someone because you just need internet BUT sometimes when you go to purchase, your credit card from X country wont as the seller is in Y country. What does work well is global, uncensorable money called crypto. So take highly accessible digital goods (NFTs) and buy/sell them in crypto, you have the lowest barriers of accessibility of basically any product out there.
Selling NFTs is how Mr Beast becomes the wealthiest person in the world. They are the only product that his global audience could easily access and purchase (using crypto) and they have the right properties that turn the purchasers into ultra fans.
If Mr Beast were to sell each of his 245m YouTube subscribers 1 NFT for $5, that would earn him $1.2 billion dollars. Now imagine if does that evey year for the next 40 years. That is $49 billion dollars! Lets bring it up a couple notches, he sells the same $5 NFT but ten times per year for the next 40 years. Now we are looking at $490 billion dollars!!! On top of that, you can embed royalties into the NFT which enables some percentage of each secondary sale to be sent to Mr Beast as a royalty fee. Bored Ape Yacht Club, the most successful NFT collection to date, has generated more than $55m in royalties alone!!
So what type of NFTs should Mr Beast create and sell? The design space around NFTs and what they can do is essentially limitless, so there are no easy answer. It mainly comes down to what Mr Beast’s longer-term objectives are. If he wants to create a book, or animated series, or some form of entertainment, he could launch a series of PFPs. If he wants to create purely collectible art NFTs he can do that. Maybe he wants to create a loyalty rewards program where holders can have special access to Mr Beast goods or a private discord channel. Or he wants to build an actual video game and the NFTs will be used as the in-game items. There are literally no limits.
Wealthiest person in the world
Mr Beast becomes the wealthiest person in the world because:
Age: He is only 24 years old. He said he wants to keep making videos for the rest of his life. He has at a minimum, 40 more years ahead of him of creating content.
Accessilbity: 60% of the world is connected to the internet. By 2030, 80% will be. YouTube is free and accessible in most countries in the world. Low barriers to entry mean more people will see Mr Beast.
Audience: Today, he has 245m YouTube subscribers. Nearly 1% of the earth’s population watches each of his videos. In 10 years from now, those numbers will likely be dramatically larger.
Growth: He has the fastest-growing YouTube and TikTok channels in the world. He is still young, only 24 years old, and his audience is growing every year. In 10 years, his audience could be
Personaity-driven businesses: People love people. Brands? Not as much. This trend is not slowing down and will likely accelerate. Mr Beast is going to continue to launch businesses.
Products with high margins: Mr Beast started selling burgers but will quickly realize the margins in the restaurant industry are pretty bad. Chocolate bars are better but what’s best are digital goods. Create a digital good once and it’s infinitely scalable. You can’t copy and paste a burger!
Sell NFTs!: As mentioned above, NFTs are the ultimate goods to sell. They are digital goods but on steroids. Exceptionally cheap to create, extremely high margins, accessible to everyone on earth with internet, secondary sale royalties, and with the innate properties that turn owners into fanatics – we got ourselves a winner.
If you liked this content, please subscribe to my newsletter Zima Red.
and give me a follow on Twitter. Stay tuned for more articles on NFTs, web3, VR, AR, AI, and all things metaverse 😎
