Mr. Beast is The Biggest Show on TV

It's time brands started treating YouTubers like TV stars

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Mr. Beast is the biggest star on YouTube. He pulled in a stunning $82 million last year. The startup Spotter has invested millions in just his back catalogue. His Feastables line of chocolate bars are ubiquitous

He still doesn’t get enough respect from the ad community.

On my podcast this week, I spoke to Ben Mathews, general partner, Night Ventures, a company that invests in creator economy firms, about - as he put it, “the incredible influence that Jimmy Donaldson, Mr. Beast has over his audience.”

“There's no one that even comes close in terms of comparison. I mean, he's getting 50 to 100 million views of his videos in the first two to three days every time he posts a video,” Mathews told me .

"When you think about the scale of that, you think about how many Oscars or Grammys or Super Bowls that represents…”

Ok, I’m ready. Cue the metrics police. I get it, the Super Bowl, The Grammys are three- to-four hour broadcasts. When you see ratings numbers for those kinds of events, you’re likely seeing an average minute audience for the whole thing. A view is…something else entirely.

Somebody already did the Mr. Beast vs. The Super Bowl debate on Twitter and got lots of - feedback.

Still, what if we took sports out of the equation? Is the comparison to TV that crazy (ducks)?

Think of it this way - is a video that generates 100 million views in a few days at least comparable to an episode of say, Night Court or Young Sheldon?

Consider that 45% of YouTube views happen on connected TVs, per Insider Intelligence…and YouTube generates a billion hours of TV viewing a day So a Beast video that hits 100 million views could theoretically deliver 45 million views on TV screens.

And, to be clear, Beast’s videos aren’t two minute clips - they are frequently 18 to 20 minutes in length. The are expensive, and highly produced. In fact, he actually doesn’t put out that many - maybe once a week. His fans subscribe, wait for them, and watch them pretty much right away. The data firm Tubular Labs says that among the 51 videos Beast released last year, 22.24% of their views were generated within three days of going live. So a video that generated 237 million views and counting would have pulled in 30 million views in three days. The average three—day viewership last year, per Tubular, was over 44 million.

Sounds a lot like TV - or even more like TV used to be in the Appointment Television days.

Yeah but— YouTube is global. So how much of Beast’s audience is in the US? 40%? I have no idea.

Plus, I hear you, Beast’s videos aren’t live…so you don’t have that concurrent viewers thing happening. Plus, there’s likely a lot of kids watching, which brands don’t care about.

Ok, sure, but among the 7 million people that watch Young Sheldon each week, how many of them are 65+, which brands don’t want either?

Yes, the comparison is imperfect. Still, there’s no doubt in my mind that Beast’s audience is massive, and rivals the loyalty and engagement of the top shows on TV. It may even be - the number one show on TV (hides).

It doesn’t seem that enough brands think of him - or other creators’ ‘shows’ (not videos) that way.

“The biggest problem he has in fact is, there's just not a lot of companies out there with the marketing budget that can afford something that has the scale of a Super Bowl in a 20-minute video for a one-minute ad read,” said Mathews. At least not from their ‘social budgets.’

“We're just kind of waiting for the advertising and marketing market to catch up.”

That’s part of the reason why Mathews and his team have pushed more top creators to expand beyond just monetizing through ads and merchandise, by becoming product marketers themselves. Of course, that’s not for everyone.

So what’s my point here? Should more brands pump money into Mr. Beast? Sure. But I’d venture the bigger questions is where brands can and should put top creators in their media mix ? What objectives do they use them for, and what media they are judged against? There may be no other stars on the Beast level, but there are many top creators that produce TV show-like quality videos and attract consistent audiences that can be thought of in the same way as linear TV.

“Although YouTube’s programming is often derided as featuring “cats on skateboards” or something equivalent, the reality is that there is a significant amount of content that would be considered to be high quality, and collectively, it requires meaningful amounts of money for its mix of studios and individual artists to produce,” wrote Madison and Wall’s Brian Wieser this week.

One real obstacle, as Mathews noted, is that creator dollars still don’t flow as easily as TV dollars.

“There's not gonna be a single platform that can come and organize the challenge that marketing managers have, which is, I have to call and get in contact with and negotiate with another human being on the other end of the phone,” he said. “We have to talk about creative. They have to build a creative. Then we have to launch it. It needs to be captioned correctly and hash tagged. And there's just a lot of service level negotiation.”

In other words, it’s far from programmatic. This is something that the creator world has yet to figure out, and would seem to offer a great opportunity for the right entrepreneur.

In the meantime, what’s the lesson for media companies here? It’s true that there is a fairly long list of creators trying TV and failing…yet there would seem to be a play here for biggest media sellers to partner with and package the biggest influencers on various platforms, or maybe to nurture up and coming talent before they come into Beast Mode.

A tougher question - is there a way to recreate the YouTuber community viewing effect on TV? That doesn’t lend itself to sitcoms and dramas, and may warrant new formats. You could argue that YouTube shows just aren’t what TV is - at least now. But for TV companies, standing pat seems awfully dangerous, as an entire generation is becoming accustomed to being entertained this way.

That’s why I’ll be watching closely as Amazon is reportedly developing a competition show with Mr. Beast for its streaming service. If anyone can crack the code on creators on TV, its him.