As far as I can see this is a non-Governmental non-profit doing this. So it has no legal
merit. Can’t tell if this is the ad industry attempting to self-regulate? The Wikipedia articles are quite mealy.
is there a name for the phenomenon where you get so tired of seeing someones face pop up over and over and over that you start to hate the person and despite their good deeds feel no remorse for them when they end up in trouble?
I think MrBeast is a very good way to tell my child that “not everything you see on the internet is true”, cue the “But why would he lie?”, “Because he wants you to keep watching his videos.”
Even if 215M in revenue on chocolate bars suggests that they might be perfectly capable of funding all their $5K and $10k givaways.
Why is the title of the post here on HN so substantially different from the actual press release? The HN post tries to make it personal, claiming an individual is doing it, while the press release (correctly) refers to the companies. That seems an impotent distinction that the HN headline carefully erases.
I guess its good that this is drawing some light on the subject, but nothing will happen.
Even if MrBeast were to be investigated by a government agency for similar issues, his business links to noted Trump sycophant Chamath Palihapitiya would shield him from any consequences for his actions.
I believe trusting any person whose incentive is to take money from you is not a prudent decision.
This happens a lot if you make your purchase decisions based on influenzas promoting certain items.
Does anyone remember when this person who worked for Mr Beast outed their fraudulent tactics? You couldn’t bring it up in a comment on their videos at all. They had a team continuous censoring all honest discussion on their videos. I find the whole phenomenon around Beast to be gross.
Pretty much every Youtube channel has at one point or another failed to disclose advertising. For a good while they were all doing it and sponsored videos containing sponsored content were entirely undeclared. Its a lot less common now presumably there is some enforcement now but I still see it quite often.
Luckily my children have all avoided these specific scammers, Mr Beast, Logan Paul, etc. But I keep my eye on the space a bit and I am appalled at how common and easy it is for these grifters to scam children.
Almost all of the content I have seen become popular have been highly toxic "relationships" with their audience. It's happening and pretty bad for non-children content, but it's happening worse and shouldn't be happening at all for childrens content.
I mean, we get it, they are a high-margin audience traditionally. Selling garbage to kids makes big bucks. Kids are dumb and they buy stupid things for non-existent reasons. That's why traditionally we have had more laws to protect them and been more vigilant about it. It seems like we've seriously slipped and just kind of thrown our hands in the air and concluded "I guess kids have to get scammed over and over"
This isn't a Mr Beast problem, it's a industry problem:
> Frontiers: How Much Influencer Marketing Is Undisclosed? Evidence from Twitter
> We study the disclosure of influencer posts on Twitter across a large set of brands based on a unique data set of over 100 million posts and a novel classification method to detect undisclosed sponsorship. Using our preferred empirical specification, we find that 96% of sponsored posts are not disclosed. This result is robust to a series of specification tests, and even a lower-bound classification still yields an undisclosed share of 82%. Despite stronger enforcement of disclosure regulations, the share of undisclosed posts decreases only slightly over time. *Compared with disclosed posts, undisclosed posts tend to be associated with young brands with a large Twitter following. Using an online survey, we find that many consumers are not able to identify sponsored content without disclosure.* Our findings highlight a potential need for further regulatory scrutiny and suggest that researchers studying influencers must account for undisclosed sponsored content.
"Right now, however, Beast Industries is hemorrhaging money. It's had three years of losses, including more than $110 million in 2024. The viral videos account for all of it, overwhelming the profits from Feastables [a convenience store that "pulls in more than $200 million a year"]. Donaldson has been spending between $3 million and $4 million on every video he produces for the main YouTube channel, most of which lose money. In 2023, Beast spent $10 million to $15 million shooting videos it never released to the public because they weren't up to its standards."
AI summary: "Creator" loses money due to production costs while third party intermediary "platform" (middleman) Google, twice convicted cybercriminal organisation, makes money by auctioning, selling, delivering and monitoring online ads, then taking a cut of advertising spend
23 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 39.1 ms ] threadI do tend to agree with the findings, regardless.
Even if 215M in revenue on chocolate bars suggests that they might be perfectly capable of funding all their $5K and $10k givaways.
Even if MrBeast were to be investigated by a government agency for similar issues, his business links to noted Trump sycophant Chamath Palihapitiya would shield him from any consequences for his actions.
https://youtu.be/k5xf40KrK3I
Almost all of the content I have seen become popular have been highly toxic "relationships" with their audience. It's happening and pretty bad for non-children content, but it's happening worse and shouldn't be happening at all for childrens content.
I mean, we get it, they are a high-margin audience traditionally. Selling garbage to kids makes big bucks. Kids are dumb and they buy stupid things for non-existent reasons. That's why traditionally we have had more laws to protect them and been more vigilant about it. It seems like we've seriously slipped and just kind of thrown our hands in the air and concluded "I guess kids have to get scammed over and over"
> Frontiers: How Much Influencer Marketing Is Undisclosed? Evidence from Twitter
> We study the disclosure of influencer posts on Twitter across a large set of brands based on a unique data set of over 100 million posts and a novel classification method to detect undisclosed sponsorship. Using our preferred empirical specification, we find that 96% of sponsored posts are not disclosed. This result is robust to a series of specification tests, and even a lower-bound classification still yields an undisclosed share of 82%. Despite stronger enforcement of disclosure regulations, the share of undisclosed posts decreases only slightly over time. *Compared with disclosed posts, undisclosed posts tend to be associated with young brands with a large Twitter following. Using an online survey, we find that many consumers are not able to identify sponsored content without disclosure.* Our findings highlight a potential need for further regulatory scrutiny and suggest that researchers studying influencers must account for undisclosed sponsored content.
https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mksc.2024.083...
Now, one could argue that Mr Beast has the means to properly disclose these issues.
Is this data valuable to me in some way?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-09-22/youtube-s...
AI summary: "Creator" loses money due to production costs while third party intermediary "platform" (middleman) Google, twice convicted cybercriminal organisation, makes money by auctioning, selling, delivering and monitoring online ads, then taking a cut of advertising spend