Mr. Beast: The Success Story of a Cross-Cultural Personality
It is almost impossible to be on YouTube nowadays without hearing about Mr. Beast. With over seventy million subscribers, Mr. Beast has become an icon among YouTubers who dominates the trending page with every video: the channel rarely sees a video get less than forty million views. Arguably more important, however, is how integrated into the culture of Youtube Mr. Beast has become, collaborating with everyone from top Twitch streamers such as Ludwig to famous Minecraft streamers like Dream.
On paper, it’d be hard to understand exactly why Mr. Beast has managed to become such an icon of YouTube popular culture. His videos are massive, professional industry productions, and yet content creators on the platform have famously pushed back against the company’s support for professional industry content from channels such as The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon or T-Series, which they’ve argued are unfair to the “small creators who kept the platform alive”.
So why has Mr. Beast has become so synonymous with YouTube culture? What has allowed him to achieve such success? Philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin wrote about something called a “cult of personality” – the connection and attachment people feel toward the names and personalities of stars – as crucial to how we interact with modern art and entertainment in the technological era (Benjamin, 1936, p. 57). The business model of content creation on YouTube has always revolved around this idea in its purest form: YouTube communities center not around the content that a channel provides, but the creators that produce it. Spend twenty minutes watching Mr. Beast videos and one thing will quickly become clear: every action he takes is made with public perception in mind. Mr. Beast’s image is entertaining, philanthropic, and caring not just for his friends but his audience (he is constantly developing new methods of facilitating audience involvement, often with massive prizes even for losers). In addition, each of his friends have established perceptions as well, character traits that different viewers attach to, all aligning with Mr. Beast’s goals and values.
The draw of Mr. Beast’s cult of personality is strong; he is the type of kind, entertaining, extroverted individual you can easily imagine being the life of any party you were at. But personality alone would not be enough to reach the level of success that Mr. Beast has – to answer that question, we must talk about the cultural lines that Mr. Beast has managed to blur.
While the childish tone of Mr. Beast’s videos makes them seem potentially targeted at children, nearly all participants in his videos are viewers who are at least high school aged, and more often college aged or older. What demographic, then, describes his audience? Socioeconomic class, specifically middle and lower class. The large cash payouts of Mr. Beast’s videos always come alongside stories of what debts recipients need to pay or what charitable cause the money will be redirected to. Mr. Beast, with his multi-million-dollar net worth, is there right beside them. Why is this significant?
Pop culture author John Storey wrote about what he called a “folk culture”: popular culture that is in essence grassroots and distinct from “top-down” highbrow culture (Storey, 2009, p. 10). What is significant about the theme of Mr. Beast’s channel – and specifically, the way he as a multi-millionaire interacts with his poorer audience – is the way he gives his audience an opportunity to experience the luxuries of rich, highbrow culture in familiar, “lowbrow” settings. Mr. Beast’s lavish spending on childish or everyday expenses (such as putting one million Christmas lights on a house or paying for participants’ student loans) allows for even passive viewers to envision what they might do with the extravagant resources of the upper socioeconomic class. This type of content works to break down what Storey would call the “distorted image of reality” our society has placed on how we see the upper class as so distant from our reach and in control over what is deemed a “worthwhile” use of money. Mr. Beast’s videos create a new “ideological form” that presents a new image of what money should be used for: philanthropy and fun for the common man. Mr. Beast’s unique ability, both financially and personality wise, to create such a bridge is what has allowed him to become so successful.
Take for example one of his most recent videos: “Last to Leave Circle Wins $500,000”. This video is typical Mr. Beast content: a massive cast of subscriber participants in an outlandish contest for an incredible cash prize. The video is fast paced and chaotic, with money constantly changing hands in between increasingly outlandish physical trials (and quips from Mr. Beast’s cast of character friends interspersed. In less than twenty minutes, Mr. Beast packs multiple days of challenges, eliminating ninety people (most of whom still walk home with a cash prize), tens of thousands of dollars in prizes, side sketches with his friends, and, most importantly, multiple interactions directly with the camera. And in that video, you can see the genuine excitement and gratefulness every participant has for being there, and you can feel the way that Mr. Beast channels that energy back to the audience: the possibility that you, the viewer, could be the next person to get to spend a millionaire’s budget on a new house or a dream car.
This is the quintessential Mr. Beast experience. Mr. Beast’s success comes not from the specific content of any one video, but from the way he uses his cult of personality to create that content and bridge a seemingly insurmountable social gap in our society. And when one sees the genuine excitement and gratitude of his audience in his videos or on social media for his work, it is hard not to see that success as deserved, especially when considering the unique and inspiring social statement his content has made in the process.
References
Benjamin, W. (1936). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (pp. 48–70). essay.
Storey, J. (2009). What is Popular Culture? In Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction (3rd ed., pp. 1–16). essay, Pearson.
Super interesting post! I have enjoyed watching Mr. Beast’s videos on YouTube too, and I completely agree that he has been able to capitalize on his cult of personality and his real-life interactions with his subscribers. I’ve also thought about how he always pulls off giving away these massive cash prizes, but now that his channel is so established, the massive prizes probably generate a lot more views. With these views, I’m sure he’s also able to generate a lot more revenue, which ends up being this cycle that feeds itself. But overall, the way he focuses his videos on revealing certain aspects of his personality like you have mentioned reminds me of Alice Marwick’s notion of microcelebrities. These exciting and fast paced videos have definitely become “on brand” for Mr. Beast, and it’s also clear that he leverages digital media in ways like directly involving his subscribers in his videos and giving sneak peeks to his next video idea to generate anticipation. Additionally, when his videos are trending on Youtube when they first come out, it will often appear on the trending page which may attract new viewers and help him gain more subscribers. Finally, because of the monetization involved, Mr. Beast is also an influencer. Mr. Beast often shows behind the scenes clips in his videos and features seemingly unscripted, natural scenes where he interacts with people in his videos. I think these are all instances where he is allowing his viewers to see the back stage which also contributes to his cult of personality. Many of these concepts talked about in class are closely related and I think Mr. Beast is a super good example of them!
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