Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, has almost become synonymous with YouTube. With almost 460 million subscribers, MrBeast has the most followers in the area. Last year, he launched his reality competition series, Animal Gameson Prime Video. With the show’s second season about to premiere, Donaldson sat down with Mashable’s Executive Producer, Mark Stetson, to discuss his rise to fame, how he built his YouTube empire, and what we can all expect from the new season. Animal Games.
Early in his career, Donaldson saw the importance of relying on YouTube as a primary source of his content. “Right now, 2 percent of humanity’s time is spent on YouTube. When I was 11 years old, I didn’t know that YouTube would grow this big. Accident? Yes. The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that I loved making YouTube videos. In the last 16 years, some people have died and YouTube has grown a lot. I was very lucky to have love, I was very lucky in my life, to be lucky to have my life. endless growth.”
Donaldson has grown his passion for making videos into a huge content empire. Not only does he have the most subscribed channel on YouTube, he is also the third most followed creator on TikTok. Jimmy has founded many brands, founded non-profits, and now has his own reality competition series on Prime Video.
The second season of Animal Games premiered on Jan. 7, with 100 of the world’s smartest people pitted against 100 of the most vocal people vying for the $5 million prize. The show has set several Guinness World Records such as: the largest physical prize money ever set ($5 million) and the most money won in a single episode of a competitive TV show ($2.02 million).
One big adjustment Donaldson was keen to use between seasons Animal Games it was to focus more on the emotional drama contestants faced during the challenges. “A lot of people wanted to know more about the contestants. In season 2, the first three episodes, there’s a lot of footage shot in the city where it’s set. It’s normal for the contestants. It’s funny because we have all these big sets, worth millions of dollars, doing these crazy things. People don’t ask me to do more shows for them. Please, between those, just show the contestants talking.”
Donaldson has built his career on creating experiences that people have never seen on screen. Even when Donaldson first got married, at the young age of 11, she wanted to do things that no one else had ever done. “That’s always been my goal: to make content that you can’t find anywhere else. If someone else has done it and you just make it a little bit different than that it doesn’t sound special. But if every video we make, you can’t find it anywhere else in the world, that’s what people see. And I think that’s why we get the views we get and why people are interested in the videos.” Donaldson feels an obligation to his audience to deliver that teaching.
“I feel like I owe it to the audience to try and mix it up and give them something they haven’t seen before.”
The first three episodes of Beast Games Season 2 are currently streaming on Prime Video. Subsequent episodes will be released weekly on Wednesdays.
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