MrBeast is losing his edge
An army of mini-Beasts is eating his lunch
YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, should be having a great summer. In June he became the user with the most subscribers in the platform's history, currently standing at over 300 million. In June alone, he gained 29 million subscribers, setting another record for the most new subscribers in a 30-day period. Oh, and he's finally making the jump to TV — streaming, at least — with an upcoming show on Amazon Prime.
And yet the internet phenom is going through his worst period since he ascended from just another popular YouTuber to the overseer of a media empire, called “the most watched person in the world” by Time. Recently, he and his team have been hit with a wave of sordid allegations, from accusations that his sets are unsafe to concerns over members of his team being inappropriate with young fans. What should have been the summer of MrBeast is now the summer of his possible implosion.
But Donaldson has another problem to contend with: he's losing his edge. There’s a new generation of MrBeasts on YouTube, and they’re replicating his style to even greater success.
To cover them, though, we first need to define the Platonic ideal of a MrBeast video. They have a very preteen-boy sensibility — lots of fast cars, things exploding, and dumb stunts. There’s usually a challenge, more often than not involving a large sum of money either spent on the challenge or as a reward. Then there's the actual aesthetic. Each video’s thumbnail features Donaldson with either an uncannily wide smile or nearly identical scream of pain, and the video’s editing is faster than fast, with dramatic zooms, over-the-top music, and, of course, the now iconic pillowy MrBeast subtitles. If you still don’t get it, check out “Giving A Random Homeless Man $10,000,” one of his breakthrough videos from 2017, or “I Spent 50 Hours in Solitary Confinement” from 2020.
Combine all this with a budget that would make Netflix blush and a Herculean lack of shamelessness, and voilà, you're MrBeast. Which is exactly what his imitators have discovered.
Take the “Stokes Twins,” a channel run by brothers Alex and Alan Stokes. According to data from Garbage Day, they’ve been one of YouTube’s fastest-growing accounts for months, gaining at least 8 million subscribers a month since March. In April and May, they grew faster than Donaldson. They've also been accused of copying ideas for pranks and challenges from other prominent channels, like “Ryan Trahan” and “Unspeakable,” copying comedy skits almost word for word, and editing their own faces into MrBeast's thumbnails and using them as their own.
Donaldson hasn't said anything directly about the Stokes brothers, but in February he did accuse a Belarusian YouTuber named Vlad Bumaga of pulling the same thumbnail trick. Bumaga’s channel, A4, has over 60 million subscribers, making it the biggest Russian-language channel on YouTube. He had an exceptionally good July, growing by 7 million new subscribers — his biggest month ever.
The last MrBeastian YouTuber worth mentioning — one who also had a great July — is Topper Guild, who found wider attention on TikTok in 2021 and has been aping Donaldson's style since 2022. Thanks to his meticulous recreations of MrBeast videos, Guild’s channel had the fifth-highest number of subscribers in July, growing by 5 million followers.
Beyond the obvious use of thumbnails and narratives, these YouTubers and many more are also copying MrBeast’s editing style, known as "retention editing." It’s reached such dizzying extremes that many editors say they don’t hold a shot for more than 1.5 seconds for fear young users might get bored.
This is not exactly surprising. YouTube, like every platform with user-generated content, is full of trends and iterative formats. Users are constantly reverse-engineering what’s worked for others and trying it themselves. But it was thought Donaldson's videos couldn't be properly imitated because of how complex and expensive they are.
MrBeast isn’t a one-man show. Donaldson’s media company, based in his hometown of Greenville, North Carolina, is reportedly set to generate $500 million in revenue this year. Thanks to that, he can employ hundreds of analysts and editors who review every element of his YouTube presence for ways to maximize engagement and game the algorithm. A member of the team said in an interview with YouTube that they create roughly 50 thumbnail concepts for every video. Thumbnails are really the driving engine of virality on the platform: it’s the first impression most users will have. You can spend all the money on a video you want, but if you can't convince someone to play it, it won't mean anything. So if YouTube virality was an arms race, Donaldson had all the nukes.
Until now.
Why have the clones suddenly started doing so well? Perhaps the controversies following Donaldson have stripped some luster off his videos. Despite all his new subscribers, his overall and 24-hour view counts haven’t meaningfully changed since the start of the year. Another theory is maybe it's not that his imitators are doing better than him, it's just that he's not growing as much. Except the numbers say otherwise. He continues to grow at a higher rate month-to-month than he used to, though not nearly as consistently.
There's also the very real chance that Donaldson is spread too thin, on the brink of overexposure. It’s a lot to create YouTube content at his usual rate of two full-length videos a month, plus daily Shorts to repost to Instagram Reels and TikTok, while producing an Amazon show. And while it may be true that Donaldson has had bad press and clearly has a lot on his plate, if you read the little he has said about his output this year, it seems much more likely that he’s simply reached the peak of what you can do on YouTube.
In March, Donaldson posted on X that he wanted to start moving away from the technique that conquered YouTube, saying he was infusing his videos with "more personality." That’s a far cry from the interview he did last year where he said he was stripping every bit of his personality from his content to make it as accessible as possible.
Whatever happens next with Donaldson, it's feeling more and more likely that the MrBeast of the next era won't actually be MrBeast, but some new young videomaker who stumbles across the magic formula for a new generation's shortening attention span.
Garbage Day is an award-winning newsletter that focuses on web culture and technology, covering a mix of memes, trends, and internet drama. We also run a program called Garbage Intelligence, a monthly report tracking the rise and fall of creators and accounts across every major platform on the web. And we'll be sharing some of our findings here in Sherwood. You can subscribe to Garbage Day here.
