MrBeast’s $5 Million Game Show Is a No-Brainer for Amazon — But What Is the YouTuber Getting Out of It?

As YouTube’s top creator moves to TV, influencer diversification has become more important than ever

The post MrBeast’s $5 Million Game Show Is a No-Brainer for Amazon — But What Is the YouTuber Getting Out of It? appeared first on TheWrap.

In March, MrBeast and Amazon Prime Video made history when they announced “Beast Games,” an upcoming reality competition show offering a cash prize of $5 million. It was largest award in TV history — part of a deal with Amazon MGM Studios reportedly worth $100 million — and one of the first major plays to bring a content creator into a more traditional TV fold.

But the gravitas of the splashy partnership goes beyond its impressive dollar amounts. By expanding his brand, MrBeast, the biggest and arguably most-famous YouTuber in history, is once again changing what it means to be a content creator — and making a ton of money in the process.

Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, skyrocketed to fame in 2017 when videos on the platform such as “I Built 100 Houses And Gave Them Away!” and “Last To Leave Circle Wins $500,000” went viral. His content often shows people competing to win vast amounts of cash or Donaldson giving away a massive prize. No matter what MrBeast does, it typically involves a huge sum of money, and it always gets millions of views.  

The shock and excitement of watching people win big has translated into a loyal audience most networks would kill for. As of June, the MrBeast YouTube channel had 295 million subscribers, beating the popular Indian music label T-Series (268 million) for the most global subscribers. The popular children’s brand Cocomelon ranks in third place with 177 million subscribers, while the WWE holds the No. 10 spot with 102 million subscribers.

Fortune and CNBC have reported that MrBeast, with a team of more than 250 people, brings in between $600 million and $700 million a year in revenue, but that he reinvests most of the money into growing his brand.

The Amazon partnership will build on that. It falls in line with recent talent investments Spotify has made for podcasters like Joe Rogan and Alex Cooper, not to mention SiriusXM — the home of Howard Stern, Megyn Kelly and Kevin Hart — as well as Amazon’s own Wondery podcast network, which signed Dax Shepard to an $80 million deal last week.

In this case, Amazon will see the benefits on Prime Video, where it has been actively courting younger influencers. “It’s about the ability to bring in Jimmy’s massive audience and skew younger with a lot of their programming,” Gabe Gordon, CEO and co-founder of Reach Agency, told TheWrap. 

The Amazon deal offers MrBeast tremendous creative freedom, media experts told TheWrap, and will help him grow his following even more by exposing him to an older audience.

“The thing about large creators like MrBeast is they do love creative control, because they’ve had creative control on their socials for so long,” Samantha Zink, CEO and founder of the social media and influencer partnerships management company Zink Talent, told TheWrap. “They aren’t used to working for people. It’s all about Amazon really trusting in that vision…and then collaborating.”

Viewed one way, MrBeast’s Amazon partnership is a triumphant underdog story about a charitable guy rising to become one of the internet’s most-beloved celebrities, armed with little more than his smile and big ideas. But viewed from another angle, it reads like a warning for future influencers. If the biggest creator on YouTube feels the need to diversify and embrace a more traditional media outlet, that doesn’t necessarily bode well for smaller creators who may want to stick to one platform.

The 26-year-old Donaldson’s YouTube success has spawned an empire of his own. The MrBeast brand has multiple sponsorship deals, a dubbing company, a philanthropy, merchandise, a statistics site and a chocolate company, as well as upcoming beverage and mobile gaming brands. And his massive YouTube viewership has translated into revenues. In 2023, across all his companies Donaldson made $82 million, more than twice the earnings of any other internet creator, Forbes reported. 

“What [creators] don’t realize is things are changing so much that you really need to continuously change in order to make money in this industry, or you’ll wake up one day with one brand deal every few months, low engagement and you’ll have to find a nine-to-five again without having [work] experience for six years,” Zink said.

“He’s saturated the market in a good way. He just dominated,” Reilly Newman, brand strategist and founder of Motif Brands, told TheWrap. “Now it makes sense for him to start shaking hands with these other production studios and channels.”

MrBeast’s expansion to Prime Video isn’t just a way for a constantly evolving creator to push himself even more. It’s also a smart move during a time when the prospect of being a professional influencer is less stable than it used to be. 

“He’s probably reading the writing on the walls of where things are going and, from a business standpoint, he’s diversifying and expanding his exposure,” Newman said.

MrBeast and Amazon declined to comment for this story.

A constantly-evolving creator

“It’s in the nature of Jimmy as a creator,” said Gabe Gordon, CEO and co-founder of Reach Agency. “Even if you look at his videos, he’s always besting himself. He’s always trying to go bigger.” 

In December of 2020 — the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic — Donaldson expanded into the food delivery market, partnering with Virtual Dining Concepts on MrBeast Burger. By January 2023, there were more than 1,700 virtual locations bringing in $150 million in total revenue.

But the future of this business is uncertain. In June of 2023 Donaldson publicly complained that MrBeast Burger is “terrible for my brand” and that VDC “won’t let me stop [his involvement in the business]”. A month later he filed a breach of contract lawsuit alleging he has never been paid; VDC countersued, accusing Donaldson of not delivering on his contractual obligations. The case, which will be heard in New York, currently has no court date.

In 2022, Donaldson expanded into the snack market with Feastables, which he says had generated $500 million as of February, 2024. He’s also launched a dubbing business with Creator Global, YouTube analytics with ViewStats.com and the nonprofit Beast Philanthropy. 

This is all to say that Jimmy Donaldson isn’t a creator who is afraid to branch out.

“Creators who are on YouTube, Tiktok, Instagram, they do feel a little stagnant after a while,” Zink said. “Opportunities with partnering with Amazon or any sort of network give them an opportunity to grow even further.”

Zink noted it’s common for her clients to feel burnt out. “You’re posting the same content, you’re doing the same thing. They’re not feeling fulfilled,” she said.

Diversification in the social age

As a whole, brands have gotten more comfortable working with social creators. Gordon noted that in his 13 years working for Reach, he’s seen budgets for creators increase year over year because “they’re highly efficient, they’re highly effective.” 

That doesn’t necessarily mean being an influencer is a viable career for most. According to a 2023 report from Goldman Sachs, about 50 million people earn money from their social media posts. Yet according to a recent study from Influencer Marketing Hub, 48% of content creators who were surveyed said they earned $15,000 or less per year.

“To me, the influencer game is a little tapped out,” Newman said.  “You’ve had the Pareto principle take place where now the big fish have absorbed the majority of the market. Many of the smaller fish, they won’t ever get on Amazon Prime or anything like that.” 

Exactly how much money a creator can earn from a certain amount of subscribers or views changes constantly as platforms, including YouTube, adjust their algorithms. With other uncertainties, like shifting advertising payout structures and a potential TikTok ban, it’s never been more important to diversify. 

A recent Wall Street Journal expose of the industry highlighted a gaming content creator who had more than 400,000 followers but only made $58,084 in 2023. Another influencer said that his TikTok videos used to generate $200 to $400 per million views, but had recently dropped to $120 for a video with 10 million views.

Most of these companies do have funds for creators as well as reward programs. TikTok’s fund, which ran from 2020 to 2023, doled out $1 billion when it existed. YouTube Shorts, the platform’s TikTok competitor, also has its own creator fund, Instagram has its Reels Play bonus program and Snapchat has a Spotlight rewards program.

They all come with asterisks. TikTok’s current rewards program only applies to users with at least 10,000 followers with at least 100,000 views in the past month. The YouTube Shorts share model requires 1,000 subscribers and 10 million public Shorts views in the past 90 days. To be eligible for Snapchat’s program, a creator needs 50,000 followers and 25 million monthly views. Instagram is even worse: The platform is currently experimenting with an invite-only option for its Reels reward program.

Failing to diversify is a trap content creators have fallen into in the past. When TikTok first launched, Zink noticed that several millennial creators who had followings on Instagram and YouTube refused to make the jump. 

“They were never able to grow a following on Tiktok, and this younger generation of Gen Z on Tiktok started blowing up. Now those people who were big names in 2015, a lot of people don’t know about them,” Zink said.

A built-in younger audience for Amazon

A new, bold game show may be an expected move from a creator who loves to push boundaries, but why choose Amazon? The top subscribed creator on YouTube could have his pick of nearly any partner.

Creative control was likely a driving factor. “Amazon gave me the creative control I need to try and make [the greatest show possible] happen,” MrBeast said in his official “Beast Games” announcement.

As Gordon understands the deal, Donaldson has been given full control over “Beast Games.” Amazon will likely provide more resources than Donaldson invests in a typical MrBeast video, Gordon said, especially with Amazon being so financially invested in the series.

“Amazon loves working with influencers,” Zink said. “They’re very in-the-now, and they know where they need to spend their money and attention.”

A good example is the Amazon storefront option, where TikTok creators can add a link to their own Amazon storefront directly to their posts, making it easy for their followers and viewers to quickly view their products or products they’re recommending. Both TikTok creators and Amazon get a cut of the purchases.

Prime Video’s “Beast Games” will also expose the Internet Age celebrity to an older audience, where new fans could lead viewers to his YouTube channel. 

Though the streamer does have some younger-appealing hits such as “The Summer I Turned Pretty” and “Fallout,” on average Prime Video has an older audience than other streamers. A study by the marketing and strategy company WARC found that users aged 55 and older accounted for 20% of all SVOD users. That number was 22% for Prime Video, likely boosted by series such as “Reacher,” “The Boys,” “Jack Ryan” and “Bosch: Legacy.” (The same study found that age demo accounted for 10% of Disney+ users and 19% of Netflix users.)

The content creator’s reputation for giving out huge sums of money may also help Amazon from a marketing perspective. “Beast Games” can be advertised as a game show with the biggest cash prize in TV history. “Putting $5 million on it, there’s your marketing budget,” Newman said. “All you need to do is create a couple ads that say that on it.” 

In the end, Donaldson is forging a path for other creators to get on television outside of reality TV. The trend of influencers making it on reality has “died down” since Charli and Dixie D’Amelio’s “The D’Amelio Show” for Hulu, Zink said. “No one wants to watch [reality TV] anymore because everything that you want to see about creators is on their YouTube anyways … Doing a different type of show, like a game show, is new and exciting and different,” he said.  

“Jimmy has done a great job of pushing things forward for all creators,” Gordon said. “It just seems like the right time, right place and right way to do it.”

The post MrBeast’s $5 Million Game Show Is a No-Brainer for Amazon — But What Is the YouTuber Getting Out of It? appeared first on TheWrap.