So Is Amazon's 'Beast Games' a Hit?
Google's AI investment vs. Google's AI problem
Amazon gave $100 million to the world’s biggest YouTuber to not only create a hit show for its Prime Video service - but to:
A) bring YouTube-centric viewers to TV, while
B) also seeing if digital creators can take their unique talents to the big screen in ways that actually make the medium bigger and better.
So did it work?
We’re about nine episodes into “Beast Games,” which premiered on Prime on December 19 (the first episode is also on YouTube), and the answer appears to be - maybe?
Here’s what we know:
Amazon says the show reached 50 million viewers in its first 25 days. That is, a lot. But that number lacks a lot of context (it’s not 50 million concurrent viewers for an hour, like a TV show). And is global btw.
In the US, Nielsen says that Beast Games generated “700 million viewing minutes across its first three episodes.” Which is 233 million minutes per episode. The episodes range between 35 and 40 minutes….but I’m not sure I’m comfortable doing math to figure out how many people are watching the show in full each week.
During the period of Dec. 30, 2024 – Jan. 5, 2025, Nielsen says that the first four episodes of the show generated 389 million minutes, landing it in the 10th spot on the ‘originals’ streaming chart.
That seems pretty good - right?!
I think so. It’s not Squid Game -but what is? Interestingly, Beast Games is well behind Land Man, a Paramount+ show aimed at a way different demographic. It’s also just behind a sleeper Apple TV hit Silo, which to be fair has produced far more episodes.
Here’s more interesting Beast Games data from the analytics firm Luminate
It seems as though interest is maybe decelerating a bit?
Maximize your YouTube advertising with VuePlanner. As a member of the YouTube Measurement Program for Brand Suitability and Contextual Targeting, VuePlanner enables you to buy with confidence, clarity, and precision. Using advanced technology and AI-powered optimization, VuePlanner offers custom-curated contextual collections, exclusive content strategies, and transparent reporting for measurable, impactful results. Take control of your campaign performance—partner with VuePlanner now.
Well, according to the analytics firm TVision (which uses facial recognition tech to measure attentiveness) - Beast Games is number 13 on its Power Score, which attempts to measure shows that have both a large audience and high engagement.
From Jan 1 to Feb 3 of this year, Beast Games’ attention index was at116, with 100 being the average across linear and streaming content, per TVision.
Ok, so people seem pretty into the show- or as into the Paramount spy series The Agency.
What about in social media? Well, according to Tubular Labs - “Beast Games-related videos have generated 979 million views on TikTok since the start of December, with MrBeast and Prime Video uploads accounting for 88 million of those views.”
Overall, this clearly isn’t the clearest math, and it speaks to the messy business of evaluating show performance in the streaming era.
So is it working? Is it buzzy? Is it achieving something bigger than just putting YouTube videos on TV? Well, for what it’s worth, critics - really hate it:
The Hollywood Reporter has a good take on a generational divide among Gen X and Gen Z on the show.
I’m not sure if critics really matter to Beast’s YouTube fans. Interestingly, the first episode of Beast Games on YouTube has generated close to 40 million views, which is a great number, but also pales to compare to many other big Beast videos. Does that mean anything? Keep in mind, Beast has a whopping 357 million subscribers on YouTube.
Did this work for Amazon? That’s going to depend on whether viewers stick with it, whether new advertising revenue can be attributed to the show (I sure that’s already true), and whether those brands are happy over time.
Does this prove that creators can do bigger things on TV? Tough call. The show is clearly not for me (weirdly, my kids, who love Mr. Beast, are not into it.) Already, other big streamers are trying to find their own creator-led shows, reported Business Insider’s Lucia Moses. The key would seem to be proving you can bring an audience with you, without losing your creator aesthetic, while also doing something more ambitious than what you can do on YouTube. Not easy.
As Entertainment Strategy Guy put it recently, something sort of feels off about Beast Games - that something from the biggest YouTuber in the world would be more of a cultural breakout (After all, Mr. Beast helped raise $33 million to clean up the oceans - so the guy can sway an audience).
“Beast Games definitely isn’t a flop or a miss,” wrote Entertainment Strategy Guy. “We can also firmly say it isn’t a hit, though..Really, the bigger issue is the cost. Beast Games is a disappointment for Amazon because of what they paid for it.”
We’ll see how much Beast is a centerpiece of this year’s upfronts, which would seem to reveal how much confidence the eCommerce giant has in the show.
Non Artificial Cash - or Problems
Google released solid earnings results this week, particularly around YouTube’s ad growth…but Wall Street wasn’t happy with the fact that the company slightly missed estimates - and that it planned to keep spending $75 billion in AI.
While AI spending means a lot of things at Google, one area where it’s a potential big issue is YouTube, which pulled in $10.5 billion in ad revenue this quarter. After years of brand safety skirmishes and quality debates, YouTube appears to have cracked the TV ad money mix. But, it’s also increasingly a haven for AI-enhanced stuff, or fully AI-made content, which brands may more may not like? Is that a looming problem?
I had media industry veteran Paul Greenberg, CEO of Butterworks, on my Next in Creator Media podcast this week, to talk about what he’s seeing - and whether brands should worry.
“I don't know if we should freak out about it, but it's absolutely happening,” he said. “And Google's admitted they're having trouble keeping up with all of the new AI-created content. But then again, they're sort of perpetuating that in a way where they've got the AI Gemini overview at the top of many searches. And how do you SEO for that? It's almost impossible because there's sort of one result that they're giving.”
Some of the AI stuff on YouTube is harmless, like lilmiquela, and some just enhances what real creators are able to do. Yet over time, “it's going to become harder and harder to separate the wheat from the chaff with those kinds of things and figure out what's real and what's going to be worth my time,” said Greenberg. “Again, it comes down to the attention economy at the end of the day. There's a finite amount of attention. That's not getting any bigger. And so at a certain point as a consumer, am I just going to turn it off and say, I can't tell what's good and what's bad. I don't know what I'm going to be fed. So I'm going to go somewhere else and try to figure out how I can do that.”