There’s nothing surprising about this for people who have done casual mobile games (the genre including Candy crush).
What we do for those is to instrument them such that we know what levels are more difficult, what levels cause more users to abandon the game temporarily, or permanently, etc.
We then dynamically tune these levels until they at least no longer cause abandonment and ideally until they increase engagement.
‘he has described tracking exactly where viewers stop watching and rebuilding videos around those drop-off points.’
I’ve seen only clips of his videos here and there, but assumed he was somewhat naturally gifted in creating content that interested people. Reading this, and his obsession with algorithms, his job seems like a hellish nightmare.
I recently stumbled upon ‘book influencers’ on YouTube and same desperation is holding them hostage. There’s no way this is fun for anyone. Being so obsessed with clicks and likes and retention and whatever. Then trying to earn money from it all. I’d literally rather be a vagabond.
I don't understand why this is surprising. I don't think you can become a YouTube influencer while ignoring the algorithm. It's absolutely not enough to be "naturally gifted" at creating interesting content, because your content will not get surfaced to more users unless the early engagement metrics are unnaturally good, because you're always competing with clips that are engineered for engagement.
This used to be different 10-15 years ago. I remember uploading some random stuff and getting 50k views. Now, I get 50 for essentially the same stuff.
And yes, there are some popular content creators who pretend not to care. I promise you that they spend a lot of time looking at metrics too.
What’s crazy about it is that he already has more than enough money to do what he wants. He could scuttle his view-maxxing and just make what he loves to make and he’d still do well and live a lavish luxurious lifestyle with no worry for lost subscribers.
E.g., we see this with the way PewDiePie “retired.” My understanding is that he only makes videos that he wants and enjoys making these days.
But that idea assumes Mr. Beast isn’t just an amoral grifter who is in this job to do exactly what we see described here. He has no passion for making videos or the content of his videos, his passion is wealth and influence accumulation.
On the other end of the spectrum we see people like Technology Connections or Tim Traveler who are completely uninterested in sponsorships or marketing efforts and they get to just make the videos they love making. There is zero view optimization when Alec makes a 1 hour video about heat pumps. He knows there’s going to be massive drop-off and doesn’t care. It’s obvious to point out that Mr. Beast got his bag orders of magnitude above and beyond creators like that and could easily stop his insane operation and do the same thing.
You and I would call this a hellish nightmare but that’s not how narcissist and narcissist-adjacent folks feel about it.
You’re incorrect about Alec from technology connections. He is very aware of hooks for videos and retention is very much on his mind. His videos are well scripted, for the most part, given his niche. But the reason the videos are an hour long is BECAUSE of the algorithm rewarding long form second screen content.
To be that kind of rich you usually have to make not only your career but your life about making money. And then it becomes your self image. The illogical decisions happen because there's nothing left of you but continuing to make the number go up.
He has investors to pay back now, so I don't think he can just do whatever. If that were me, I would consider myself fucked. But in his case I suspect this is already what he wants to do.
Alternatively, you could consider that maybe he just wants to be the best. In that viewpoint it would be like telling Usain Bolt to stop sprinting, because he already has money. Why go for a world record? Just stop bro.
He's explicitly on record on talking about view count and view retention being his explicit north star. You go back and watch his early work and he has been truly obsessed since the beginning. He wants to be popular. He loves the spectacle. Now, he may have become more jaded as time goes on; he certainly could pull back at this time. But he would lose that attention, and I think that's what truly matters to him.
I mean if you are of the opinion that people stop watching videos because they don't like them and continue watching because they do, then it would logically follow that by tweaking videos in such a way that people keep watching, you are giving them what they want (even if it's not necessarily what they may say they want). You don't need to be a narcissist grifter to want to make what people want. It's not like this is high art, it's mass consumer entertainment.
Imagine what all those billionaires could do good for humanity with all that money they can never spend. Instead, they chose to make the world worse and gain even more money they can't spend until they die.
Greed isn't the menace, humanity is. How do you think those people got those billions? What do you think MrBeast is doing when he's rebuilding his videos around where people drop off?
They are giving people what they want. Surely they have given more people what those people wanted than you have. They have become very, very good at giving people what they want. What, after all, is an "algorithm"?
It's the people who want things that aren't in their own best interest. And when you take it upon yourself to "do good" in ways that deviate from what people want, you are taking the position of "the people don’t know what’s best for them, but I do."
The "they" in your "they chose to make the world worse," is the majority of the human populace.
It’s not as though billionaires are exclusively evil people who never spend a dime on another. Bill Gates nearly eradicated a major disease. Bezos is building a clock with a mind on a ten thousand year lifespan. Azim Premji has given away significant numbers of shares to charity focused largely on education and improving quality of life for hundreds of millions. Chuck Feeny gave his whole fortune away secretly. Bloomberg gave away $4 billion in 2025 alone.
That's a weird thing to assume. Popularity and top charts are never about fun, it's hellish work and attention engineering. Music industry knew this since at least Bing Crosby.
I'm always reminded of a study of empirical music tastes: the scientists wanted to to determine if there was some kind of intrinsic property to music that would naturally be reveal in the lab. So they created some generic music, split people into groups: one where people could see each other's choices and one where they couldnt; and they ran this several times with different people over and over.
The only thing that elevated music was when people could see others choices and select music just snowballed to popularity.
Most of reality is shaped like that. Once you see that Elon musk was just in the right asshole location, then you can release the shackles of the "meritocracy" that obscures just random chance and personality choices.
That sounds like René Girard's "mimesis of desire" in which we desire the things because we observe other people desiring them.
Since learning of it I frequently ask myself how much I actually want something, versus "How much do I want this because I feel that I _should_ have it because I saw others desire it?"
Have there been any other studies that attempt to confirm this theory?
Cuban is a total moron overall, mrbeast clearly a smart guy who is extremely driven, but this drive is all towards turning my 11 year old into a youtube watching vegetable so this guy can get lost
What I actually find interesting about him and Cocomelon is that they actually follow stats and metrics to generate content that garners most clicks or keeps most engagement... Somehow it almost feels like lot of other more traditional media doesn't even attempt that. Like they pay lip service to it by committees. But they don't actually make content like that.
I ever heard of him in the context of having the most subscribers, tried to watch his videos and they look very non-Youtubish to me. They look old school reality TV-like and this is a genre I can’t stand. Maybe he doesn’t know anything special about YT or its algo, maybe it’s just that there’s awful lot of reality TV loving people.
Same, except I get bombarded with Joe Rogan videos. I never click on them, but I guess the algorithm says, "Middle-aged white guy. Give him Joe Rogan. Lots of Joe Rogan."
He must have given up on me. I'm aware of him tangentially, but I've never consumed even one of his videos or whatever he does. I believe I should be studied.
They don’t look very professional in the Folding Ideas video. They look like a bunch of 20 something friends with outsized resources bumbling their way to content production.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0dwagg5wYY4&ra=m
Lot of people like repetitive content it seems. And that goes for everything. I have no idea of music, but I have understood that people tend to listen to same genres inside which things are pretty much the same.
Same goes for TV shows, soap operas and sitcoms are popular. Same thing repeated for countless episodes. In general lot of tv shows were a story of the week variety.
Movies too. Sequel after sequel or some generic thing following same tropes and plot points...
Oh and why not lot of books. Mostly same thing repeated in each book with slight variations...
I think people just might like formulaic repetitive content...
I watch a guy solve a sudoku every day. The puzzle is always different, but conceptually it's just a minor variant of the same video. I don't watch Mr Beast or that sort of content but I can't judge anyone who does.
I used to love playing Magic The Gathering. But the hygiene issues at LGS and trolling issues with MTGO left me bereft. I found a YT channel which mostly played the sorts of decks I like (control) so I latched onto that as my MTG outlet. The exact same format over and over again, but it scratched the right itch to keep me coming back. Up until they added Members Only videos.
I'm sure there are a lot of people (mostly kids) who legitimately watch MrBeast's content, but I'm also convinced that viewbotting to boost numbers is much more widespread than is generally acknowledged across YouTube, Twitch, etc, and the platforms don't really care so long as the advertisers don't make a stink about it.
It seems like every couple of years they'll do some bare minimum pruning of the most egregious outliers to make a show to the advertisers that something is being done and then things slide back to normal within weeks to months.
so "spends millions to make billions"?
it makes sense tho. he has 400-500 ppl working for him, 200 the marketing side. if a quarter of that handles SEO/creative/engineering part for 4 major platforms + an extra team, that comes to 50 x 80k / yr = $5.2M. and this is on the low end of estimations.
There’s nothing surprising about this for people who have done casual mobile games (the genre including Candy crush).
What we do for those is to instrument them such that we know what levels are more difficult, what levels cause more users to abandon the game temporarily, or permanently, etc.
We then dynamically tune these levels until they at least no longer cause abandonment and ideally until they increase engagement.
‘he has described tracking exactly where viewers stop watching and rebuilding videos around those drop-off points.’
I’ve seen only clips of his videos here and there, but assumed he was somewhat naturally gifted in creating content that interested people. Reading this, and his obsession with algorithms, his job seems like a hellish nightmare.
I recently stumbled upon ‘book influencers’ on YouTube and same desperation is holding them hostage. There’s no way this is fun for anyone. Being so obsessed with clicks and likes and retention and whatever. Then trying to earn money from it all. I’d literally rather be a vagabond.
I don't understand why this is surprising. I don't think you can become a YouTube influencer while ignoring the algorithm. It's absolutely not enough to be "naturally gifted" at creating interesting content, because your content will not get surfaced to more users unless the early engagement metrics are unnaturally good, because you're always competing with clips that are engineered for engagement.
This used to be different 10-15 years ago. I remember uploading some random stuff and getting 50k views. Now, I get 50 for essentially the same stuff.
And yes, there are some popular content creators who pretend not to care. I promise you that they spend a lot of time looking at metrics too.
>assumed he was somewhat naturally gifted in creating content that interested people
I think his first video was just a recording of him counting to one million.
What’s crazy about it is that he already has more than enough money to do what he wants. He could scuttle his view-maxxing and just make what he loves to make and he’d still do well and live a lavish luxurious lifestyle with no worry for lost subscribers.
E.g., we see this with the way PewDiePie “retired.” My understanding is that he only makes videos that he wants and enjoys making these days.
But that idea assumes Mr. Beast isn’t just an amoral grifter who is in this job to do exactly what we see described here. He has no passion for making videos or the content of his videos, his passion is wealth and influence accumulation.
On the other end of the spectrum we see people like Technology Connections or Tim Traveler who are completely uninterested in sponsorships or marketing efforts and they get to just make the videos they love making. There is zero view optimization when Alec makes a 1 hour video about heat pumps. He knows there’s going to be massive drop-off and doesn’t care. It’s obvious to point out that Mr. Beast got his bag orders of magnitude above and beyond creators like that and could easily stop his insane operation and do the same thing.
You and I would call this a hellish nightmare but that’s not how narcissist and narcissist-adjacent folks feel about it.
You’re incorrect about Alec from technology connections. He is very aware of hooks for videos and retention is very much on his mind. His videos are well scripted, for the most part, given his niche. But the reason the videos are an hour long is BECAUSE of the algorithm rewarding long form second screen content.
Plenty of people minmax video games where they're paying, not being paid, to do it.
I don't see any reason why view-maxing and what he loves to make can't be the same thing.
To be that kind of rich you usually have to make not only your career but your life about making money. And then it becomes your self image. The illogical decisions happen because there's nothing left of you but continuing to make the number go up.
> has more than enough money to do what he wants
I think he's also doing exacty what he wants to be doing.
He has investors to pay back now, so I don't think he can just do whatever. If that were me, I would consider myself fucked. But in his case I suspect this is already what he wants to do.
> and just make what he loves to make
That is what he loves to make, there is nothing more to it.
Alternatively, you could consider that maybe he just wants to be the best. In that viewpoint it would be like telling Usain Bolt to stop sprinting, because he already has money. Why go for a world record? Just stop bro.
The best at what? Making money on YouTube? View count?
He's explicitly on record on talking about view count and view retention being his explicit north star. You go back and watch his early work and he has been truly obsessed since the beginning. He wants to be popular. He loves the spectacle. Now, he may have become more jaded as time goes on; he certainly could pull back at this time. But he would lose that attention, and I think that's what truly matters to him.
Alright if that's the case then more power to him.
Being the best at making YouTube videos, yes.
I mean if you are of the opinion that people stop watching videos because they don't like them and continue watching because they do, then it would logically follow that by tweaking videos in such a way that people keep watching, you are giving them what they want (even if it's not necessarily what they may say they want). You don't need to be a narcissist grifter to want to make what people want. It's not like this is high art, it's mass consumer entertainment.
Greed is a menace on humanity.
Imagine what all those billionaires could do good for humanity with all that money they can never spend. Instead, they chose to make the world worse and gain even more money they can't spend until they die.
It would be sad if it wouldn't be so terrible.
Greed isn't the menace, humanity is. How do you think those people got those billions? What do you think MrBeast is doing when he's rebuilding his videos around where people drop off?
They are giving people what they want. Surely they have given more people what those people wanted than you have. They have become very, very good at giving people what they want. What, after all, is an "algorithm"?
It's the people who want things that aren't in their own best interest. And when you take it upon yourself to "do good" in ways that deviate from what people want, you are taking the position of "the people don’t know what’s best for them, but I do."
The "they" in your "they chose to make the world worse," is the majority of the human populace.
It’s not as though billionaires are exclusively evil people who never spend a dime on another. Bill Gates nearly eradicated a major disease. Bezos is building a clock with a mind on a ten thousand year lifespan. Azim Premji has given away significant numbers of shares to charity focused largely on education and improving quality of life for hundreds of millions. Chuck Feeny gave his whole fortune away secretly. Bloomberg gave away $4 billion in 2025 alone.
People are multifaceted, as it turns out.
Like running an startup, numbers are the boss.
> Being so obsessed with clicks and likes and retention and whatever. Then trying to earn money from it all
The pressure goes the other way around, though. Once somebody’s living depends on it, they have to make content that makes them money.
Hence why developers continue to make AI integrations, adtech etc, despite the natural adverseness to it.
That's a weird thing to assume. Popularity and top charts are never about fun, it's hellish work and attention engineering. Music industry knew this since at least Bing Crosby.
I'm always reminded of a study of empirical music tastes: the scientists wanted to to determine if there was some kind of intrinsic property to music that would naturally be reveal in the lab. So they created some generic music, split people into groups: one where people could see each other's choices and one where they couldnt; and they ran this several times with different people over and over.
The only thing that elevated music was when people could see others choices and select music just snowballed to popularity.
Most of reality is shaped like that. Once you see that Elon musk was just in the right asshole location, then you can release the shackles of the "meritocracy" that obscures just random chance and personality choices.
Link to the study?
That sounds like René Girard's "mimesis of desire" in which we desire the things because we observe other people desiring them.
Since learning of it I frequently ask myself how much I actually want something, versus "How much do I want this because I feel that I _should_ have it because I saw others desire it?"
Have there been any other studies that attempt to confirm this theory?
Cuban is a total moron overall, mrbeast clearly a smart guy who is extremely driven, but this drive is all towards turning my 11 year old into a youtube watching vegetable so this guy can get lost
What I actually find interesting about him and Cocomelon is that they actually follow stats and metrics to generate content that garners most clicks or keeps most engagement... Somehow it almost feels like lot of other more traditional media doesn't even attempt that. Like they pay lip service to it by committees. But they don't actually make content like that.
It's exactly the same sort of SEO slop you see trying to game Google algorithms.
It’s weird - I use YouTube a lot and I’ve never ever been recommended one of his videos.
I ever heard of him in the context of having the most subscribers, tried to watch his videos and they look very non-Youtubish to me. They look old school reality TV-like and this is a genre I can’t stand. Maybe he doesn’t know anything special about YT or its algo, maybe it’s just that there’s awful lot of reality TV loving people.
Same, except I get bombarded with Joe Rogan videos. I never click on them, but I guess the algorithm says, "Middle-aged white guy. Give him Joe Rogan. Lots of Joe Rogan."
Same. I guess I’ll give credit to the YouTube algorithm; it knows what I like. And I guess it knows I’m not the right viewer for his stuff.
Same but my son gets them A LOT. he was watching gaming content and that was that
I'd say the same, except when I land there not logged in. Then it's a shit show.
He must have given up on me. I'm aware of him tangentially, but I've never consumed even one of his videos or whatever he does. I believe I should be studied.
Who watches the 10,000th iteration of "locking up 100 people in $place and who stays the longest gets $100,000", badly filmed and badly presented?
The pioneers of this genre were Big Brother by RTL in the 1990s. It was at least professionally produced.
It is hard not to think of viewbotting.
MrBeast stuff is professionally produced. He is only the face and boss of a large company with a lot of employees.
They don’t look very professional in the Folding Ideas video. They look like a bunch of 20 something friends with outsized resources bumbling their way to content production. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0dwagg5wYY4&ra=m
Yeah. In the videos I've seen, the execution has been weak and haphazard.
Lot of people like repetitive content it seems. And that goes for everything. I have no idea of music, but I have understood that people tend to listen to same genres inside which things are pretty much the same. Same goes for TV shows, soap operas and sitcoms are popular. Same thing repeated for countless episodes. In general lot of tv shows were a story of the week variety. Movies too. Sequel after sequel or some generic thing following same tropes and plot points... Oh and why not lot of books. Mostly same thing repeated in each book with slight variations...
I think people just might like formulaic repetitive content...
I watch a guy solve a sudoku every day. The puzzle is always different, but conceptually it's just a minor variant of the same video. I don't watch Mr Beast or that sort of content but I can't judge anyone who does.
Simon or Mark?
I used to love playing Magic The Gathering. But the hygiene issues at LGS and trolling issues with MTGO left me bereft. I found a YT channel which mostly played the sorts of decks I like (control) so I latched onto that as my MTG outlet. The exact same format over and over again, but it scratched the right itch to keep me coming back. Up until they added Members Only videos.
> It is hard not to think of viewbotting.
I'm sure there are a lot of people (mostly kids) who legitimately watch MrBeast's content, but I'm also convinced that viewbotting to boost numbers is much more widespread than is generally acknowledged across YouTube, Twitch, etc, and the platforms don't really care so long as the advertisers don't make a stink about it.
It seems like every couple of years they'll do some bare minimum pruning of the most egregious outliers to make a show to the advertisers that something is being done and then things slide back to normal within weeks to months.
Children
so "spends millions to make billions"? it makes sense tho. he has 400-500 ppl working for him, 200 the marketing side. if a quarter of that handles SEO/creative/engineering part for 4 major platforms + an extra team, that comes to 50 x 80k / yr = $5.2M. and this is on the low end of estimations.