{"id":19005,"date":"2025-06-03T04:37:35","date_gmt":"2025-06-03T02:37:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/2025\/06\/03\/the-mozart-of-the-attention-economy-why-mrbeast-is-the-worlds-biggest-youtube-star-mark-oconnell\/"},"modified":"2025-06-03T04:37:35","modified_gmt":"2025-06-03T02:37:35","slug":"the-mozart-of-the-attention-economy-why-mrbeast-is-the-worlds-biggest-youtube-star-mark-oconnell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/2025\/06\/03\/the-mozart-of-the-attention-economy-why-mrbeast-is-the-worlds-biggest-youtube-star-mark-oconnell\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018The Mozart of the attention economy\u2019: why MrBeast is the world\u2019s biggest YouTube star | Mark O\u2019Connell"},"content":{"rendered":"

He\u2019s spent 24 hours immersed in slime, two days buried alive \u2013 and showered vast amounts of cash on lucky participants. But are MrBeast\u2019s videos simply very savvy clickbait \u2013 or acts of avant garde genius?<\/p>\n

Jimmy Donaldson, the 27-year-old online content creator and entrepreneur known as MrBeast, is by any reasonable metric one of the most popular entertainers on the planet. His YouTube channel, to which he posts his increasingly elaborate and expensively produced videos, has 400 million subscribers \u2013 more than the population of the United States of America and equivalent to the total number of native English speakers currently alive. It\u2019s close to twice as many subscribers as Elon Musk has X followers, and over 100 million more than Taylor Swift has Instagram followers. And that number, 400 million, does not account for the people who watch MrBeast\u2019s videos in passing, or who are aware of his cultural presence because of their children, or who just sort of know who he is but don\u2019t have any intricate awareness as to why he is famous.<\/p>\n

That number is the number of people who have made the volitional move of clicking that subscribe button, to ensure that they will a) not miss his latest videos and b) can be literally counted by potential advertisers as a more-or-less guaranteed audience. One last fact, before we move away from numbers and into more nebulous modes of consideration: his 2024 Amazon Prime reality competition show, Beast Games, in which 1,000 contestants competed for $5m (\u00a33.7m), the largest cash prize in television history, reportedly\u00a0cost $100m to produce, making it the most expensive unscripted show in history. Jimmy Donaldson, at the risk of belabouring the obvious, is\u00a0an incredibly big deal.<\/p>\n

Continue reading…<\/a>
\nHe\u2019s spent 24 hours immersed in slime, two days buried alive \u2013 and showered vast amounts of cash on lucky participants. But are MrBeast\u2019s videos simply very savvy clickbait \u2013 or acts of avant garde genius?
\nJimmy Donaldson, the 27-year-old online content creator and entrepreneur known as MrBeast, is by any reasonable metric one of the most popular entertainers on the planet. His YouTube channel, to which he posts his increasingly elaborate and expensively produced videos, has 400 million subscribers \u2013 more than the population of the United States of America and equivalent to the total number of native English speakers currently alive. It\u2019s close to twice as many subscribers as Elon Musk has X followers, and over 100 million more than Taylor Swift has Instagram followers. And that number, 400 million, does not account for the people who watch MrBeast\u2019s videos in passing, or who are aware of his cultural presence because of their children, or who just sort of know who he is but don\u2019t have any intricate awareness as to why he is famous.
\nThat number is the number of people who have made the volitional move of clicking that subscribe button, to ensure that they will a) not miss his latest videos and b) can be literally counted by potential advertisers as a more-or-less guaranteed audience. One last fact, before we move away from numbers and into more nebulous modes of consideration: his 2024 Amazon Prime reality competition show, Beast Games, in which 1,000 contestants competed for $5m (\u00a33.7m), the largest cash prize in television history, reportedly\u00a0cost $100m to produce, making it the most expensive unscripted show in history. Jimmy Donaldson, at the risk of belabouring the obvious, is\u00a0an incredibly big deal. Continue reading…Technology | The Guardian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

He\u2019s spent 24 hours immersed in slime, two days buried alive \u2013 and showered vast amounts of cash on lucky participants. But are MrBeast\u2019s videos simply very savvy clickbait \u2013 or acts of avant garde genius? Jimmy Donaldson, the 27-year-old online content creator and entrepreneur known as MrBeast, is by any reasonable metric one of …<\/p>\n

\u2018The Mozart of the attention economy\u2019: why MrBeast is the world\u2019s biggest YouTube star | Mark O\u2019Connell<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":19006,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19005"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19005\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}