Jimmy Donaldson was born in 1998 in the American state of Kansas to a military family. The Donaldsons moved often, and after the divorce, his mother, Jimmy, and his older brother CJ stayed in Greenville, North Carolina. There, the future king of YouTube began attending a small private school with a religious focus.
People close to the blogger describe him as “obsessed” — Jimmy doesn’t just fixate on his goal, he fills his entire life with it. He approached video blogging, which was just starting to become an industry at the time, with the same passion and tenacity. In 2012, Donaldson started the MrBeast6000 channel, where he uploaded Minecraft and Call of Duty let’s plays. Felix PewDiePie Kjellberg, a rising YouTube star of the time, was doing roughly the same thing.
Jimmy was so carried away by the idea and did not notice anything around him that his classmates considered him autistic. “For about five years of my life, I was obsessed with studying YouTube algorithms,” Mr. Beast himself said in an interview with Rolling Stone. “I would wake up, order food delivery. And then I would sit at the computer all day, studying things with other YouTubers.” At that time, the content maker had already moved on from Let’s Plays to reviews of other bloggers.
In 2015, Jimmy Donaldson makes a video in his room and talks about how much YouTubers earn. Source: MrBeast YouTube channel
No one could have guessed what the teenage hobby would turn into. Donaldson's mother was not thrilled about this activity either. She learned about her son's hobby from his senior yearbook. At his mother's request, Jimmy nevertheless entered the local college, but did not attend a single class, dropped out in the first semester and focused on his YouTube career. Upon learning of this, his mother kicked him out of the house.
Mr. Beast made his first truly viral video in 2017, five years after creating his channel. At the time, the 18-year-old guy decided to implement a simple idea on his channel: count to 100,000. The blogger spent more than 40 hours in front of the camera, counting out loud, and at the end of the experiment, he added: “What am I doing with my life?” As a result, the video titled “I Counted to 100,000” became a hit and has collected more than 27 million views since its publication.
“I hope that at least 100 thousand people will subscribe to you,” the blogger wished his future self in 2015. By May 2017, the number of followers had already exceeded one million.
The channel's signature feature was videos with meaningless and therefore attention-grabbing challenges. At first, Donaldson built a wall out of cups and read out the longest English word. Gradually, the scale of the challenges grew: the blogger launched the most expensive fireworks in the world, built huge towers out of Lego using construction equipment, and went to an uninhabited island.
The result is tens of millions of views and advertising revenue that pays for even the craziest ideas. Mr. Beast releases one or two videos a month. And over the past five years, each video has collected at least 10 million views.
