‘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.
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.
You and I would call this a hellish nightmare but that’s not how narcissist and narcissist-adjacent folks feel about it.
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.
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.
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.
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 is the root of just about every problem we have, but that does not mean billionaires are bad. I'm pretty sure these valuations are all on paper, that is to say, they don't actually have a billion dollars of cash, they own things that people just value highly because they generally produce things of value for other non-billionaire people.
I love when people bring up this video as it gives me hope.
Hope because it is a dead end ideology and believing shows that evil peoples horizon doesn't reach that far and there is a wall they're unable to cross. In the end this will be their end too.
Yes sure, there is no society right now which is not based on greed (it is a very basic view but, let's work with it for the moment) however the reason we, as a humanity thrived and got so far is because it was more then greed. People got together beyond their families, later beyond their clans to grow bigger. Those who preferred greed did not succeed as a society.
Friedman lists Einstein. Einstein developed his special relativity in 1905 while employed at the Swiss Federal Patent Office in Bern. That was literally a government bureau. He studied at ETH Zurich, a federal, state-funded university. His work was built on works of others, published in publicly funded academic journals. Science IS shared work. And I mean...Einstein wrote on this topic: “Why Socialism?”.
The mass market for his cars depended on public road building. Federal Aid Road Act 1916 he became so successful because of those governmental bureaus and state and society as a whole.
My point is: just because we don't have a system working without greed, doesn't mean that it is some natural law of the universe. We can thrive to develop this society because there is progress in it for the whole of humanity.
While in selfishness, anti-social behaviour and greed, there is only doom and hate. As we see clearly these days.
PS: just to prevent a common derailment technique at this point: I DO NOT believe Socialism is a solution here. I grew up in a socialist state and I know that it is evil just like all other iterations of Socialism have been. It is just another version of greed where the greed doesn't go to greedy investors but to greedy party members.
Those societies might have been killed off by the greedy societies. If you take Milton Friedman's comments in your video about Russia and China, that seems like a possibility.
I'm not saying all greed is bad, but that greed can lead to bad things.
I want things, and that makes me greedy, but I'm not going to steal, cheat, kill, or do other bad things to satiate my greed - for some people, their greed is more powerful than their morality.
For many people though, their greed about wanting to look better in the eyes of others, or other egotistical things, often leads to strife. So that kind or level of greed is not good either.
Innovation can come from other places besides greed, and I am not arguing against the free market or capitalism where your reply with the video seems to maybe indicate that I am.
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.
Can you clarify what you mean by "second screen content" here? I don't feel like I would get anything out of Alec's videos by "watching" them while really watching something else (which is how I understand that term, possibly incorrectly). Do people really do that?
the main screen could be web browsing, video game, work. That screen is the primary focus. My wife watched 20-60 min yt vids during her work day on an ipad.
Normally “second screen content” refers to something you glance at while doing your main task such as a day job (emails, etc).
Another example is Old School Runescape, which has gained a moniker of “second screen game” because a lot of the boring grindy content can be done while focusing on something else.
I’m sure he’s aware of it as all creators have the tools to be aware of these sort of things, I just don’t get the impression from his content that he’s super concerned about taking that information and acting upon it.
I.e., if YouTube didn’t provide any analytics of any kind, I don’t think his content would change.
Yeah if you pay for his patreon you can read his discord where he’s mentioned it. Also I think on stage at a recent youtube convention in san mateo he mentioned he always looks for the hook.
Note also the increase in video length corresponding with the platform’s algorithm changes
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?
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" in creating interesting content, because your content will not get surfaced to more users unless the early engagement metrics are good.
This used to be different 10-15 years ago. I remember uploading some random stuff and getting 50k views. Now, I get 50 because there are countless other people optimizing their content to capture and monetize the same audience.
And yes, there are some content creators who pretend not to care. I promise you that they spend a lot of time looking at metrics too.
Why hellish? Not that different from a CEO or a CFO obsessing over sales metrics. I think it's fair to say that it's unglamorous, and probably clashes with the perception that YouTubers are just hobbyists pursuing their passion, but that's more or less dead. Too much money at stake.
There is a PDF of "HOW TO SUCCEED IN MRBEAST PRODUCTION". You should read it. He is VERY clear what the goal is:
"Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the
number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced
videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not
the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
Everything we want will come if we strive for that. Sounds obvious but after 6
months in the weeds a lot of people tend to forget what we are actually trying to
achieve here."
It’s basically how to manipulate and control people’s minds, hence why these types of people have cult like followers and why children are the most vulnerable to it all.
But isn't this just entrepreneurship? The stories about starting and running companies don't sound like fun. I mean I was the first Engineer hire out of school for a small company and got to see this in up close. These guys are trying to run a business in a ridiculously competitive and saturated market. It's not a hobby.
what he doesn't measure well are people completely starting to reject his videos for the same reason reasons (not explicitly motivated just because something feels really off about the whole show, for example in his strong versus smart videos the smart stood no chance because they had to do muscle competitions too)
> but assumed he was somewhat naturally gifted in creating content that interested people
He wrote an internal handbook that circulated the Internet a few months back, in which he is describing exactly what he built: a data driven content optimization farm. He isn't creating honestly interesting content (or probably much at all, himself, these days) - he's speed-running some unholy blend of venture-capital risk taking approach with Wall Street level internal pressure. He gives his employees money to test ideas and aggressively iterate on them, while continuously accumulating a detailed model of how the algorithm can be gamed.
Or in short, his organization is social media's paperclip maximizer.
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.
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
And yet, they are massively successful measuring by content consumption and profitability. Those outsized resources come from actual money their videos make.
Would you rather be an investor in a “professional” production like Madame Web which was very well produced by well known people and studios and lost a high 8 figure amount, or invested in a YouTube channel that appears to be 20 something friends “bumbling their way to content production” that reliably rakes in millions.
It may look bumbling and disorganized, but they are consistently producing the most viewed content on YouTube and making millions.
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.
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.
Traditional tv lives and dies by Nielsen ratings which are a proxy for views. Hollywood lives and dies by box office take, with token nods to awards. Music has charts. Books have bestseller lists.
Anyone in any of these media industries will happily tell you that what gets made next is heavily dependent on what is being consumed now. If you want to sell books, you’re going to do a lot better writing sports romances for 30 somethings or romance fantasy aimed at slightly above young adult. There’s a lot of that coming out and it’s based on the success of Heated Rivalry, ACOTAR and Fourth Wing.
How old is "The tipping point"? It has a whole chapter devoted to how Blues Clue and Sesame street test episodes in rooms with children and toys, and producers notes which scenes the children look away or play with toys, so they can be edited or rewritten.
I feel like the algo has gone pretty narrow in the last couple of weeks and just gives me a pile of stuff all exactly the same as the last couple of things I watched. So out of a universe of videos I have riffs on the same three things.
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 here. I must have done a "Don't recommend channel" on enough crap over the years that the algorithm must have learned not to show this stuff to me.
I think his target audience is mostly underage people. This works great for him because the amount of video kids consume is insane. I’ve seen my nephew watch shorts on a phone while watching another long form video on tv and playing Roblox on his tablet, for hours and hours a day.
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.
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.
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.
Addiction engineering! One of the most influential developments in tech to emerge out of San Francisco. You're right, there's nothing really new about this.
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
If you realize it by now, he is an AI company. He evaluates every part of viewer retention and maximizes watch time hours. With all the data that he has internally, I bet he's hiring AI engineers just to decode it and run some useful A/B tests.
Interesting to note here that he's wildly unprofitable. "Beast Industries lost almost $60 million in 2024. Its Feastables snack line generated roughly $250 million in sales and more than $20 million in profit, while the media business produced similar sales and lost almost $80 million."
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 20.0 ms ] threadI’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.
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.
You and I would call this a hellish nightmare but that’s not how narcissist and narcissist-adjacent folks feel about it.
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.
Milton Friedman - 1979 https://www.tiktok.com/@businessblurb/video/7692147999962582...
Hope because it is a dead end ideology and believing shows that evil peoples horizon doesn't reach that far and there is a wall they're unable to cross. In the end this will be their end too.
Yes sure, there is no society right now which is not based on greed (it is a very basic view but, let's work with it for the moment) however the reason we, as a humanity thrived and got so far is because it was more then greed. People got together beyond their families, later beyond their clans to grow bigger. Those who preferred greed did not succeed as a society.
Friedman lists Einstein. Einstein developed his special relativity in 1905 while employed at the Swiss Federal Patent Office in Bern. That was literally a government bureau. He studied at ETH Zurich, a federal, state-funded university. His work was built on works of others, published in publicly funded academic journals. Science IS shared work. And I mean...Einstein wrote on this topic: “Why Socialism?”.
The mass market for his cars depended on public road building. Federal Aid Road Act 1916 he became so successful because of those governmental bureaus and state and society as a whole.
My point is: just because we don't have a system working without greed, doesn't mean that it is some natural law of the universe. We can thrive to develop this society because there is progress in it for the whole of humanity.
While in selfishness, anti-social behaviour and greed, there is only doom and hate. As we see clearly these days.
PS: just to prevent a common derailment technique at this point: I DO NOT believe Socialism is a solution here. I grew up in a socialist state and I know that it is evil just like all other iterations of Socialism have been. It is just another version of greed where the greed doesn't go to greedy investors but to greedy party members.
I'm not saying all greed is bad, but that greed can lead to bad things.
I want things, and that makes me greedy, but I'm not going to steal, cheat, kill, or do other bad things to satiate my greed - for some people, their greed is more powerful than their morality.
For many people though, their greed about wanting to look better in the eyes of others, or other egotistical things, often leads to strife. So that kind or level of greed is not good either.
Innovation can come from other places besides greed, and I am not arguing against the free market or capitalism where your reply with the video seems to maybe indicate that I am.
Another example is Old School Runescape, which has gained a moniker of “second screen game” because a lot of the boring grindy content can be done while focusing on something else.
I’m sure he’s aware of it as all creators have the tools to be aware of these sort of things, I just don’t get the impression from his content that he’s super concerned about taking that information and acting upon it.
I.e., if YouTube didn’t provide any analytics of any kind, I don’t think his content would change.
I don't see any reason why view-maxing and what he loves to make can't be the same thing.
I think he's also doing exacty what he wants to be doing.
The pressure goes the other way around, though. Once somebody’s living depends on it, they have to make content that makes them money.
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?
This used to be different 10-15 years ago. I remember uploading some random stuff and getting 50k views. Now, I get 50 because there are countless other people optimizing their content to capture and monetize the same audience.
And yes, there are some content creators who pretend not to care. I promise you that they spend a lot of time looking at metrics too.
I wouldn’t. It sounds hellish to me. But different strokes for different folks…
I think his first video was just a recording of him counting to one million.
"Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. Everything we want will come if we strive for that. Sounds obvious but after 6 months in the weeds a lot of people tend to forget what we are actually trying to achieve here."
He is, but he also was one of the first youtubers who really figured out how to game the modern algos.
That sounds like your SEO average day
He wrote an internal handbook that circulated the Internet a few months back, in which he is describing exactly what he built: a data driven content optimization farm. He isn't creating honestly interesting content (or probably much at all, himself, these days) - he's speed-running some unholy blend of venture-capital risk taking approach with Wall Street level internal pressure. He gives his employees money to test ideas and aggressively iterate on them, while continuously accumulating a detailed model of how the algorithm can be gamed.
Or in short, his organization is social media's paperclip maximizer.
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.
I think people just might like formulaic repetitive content...
Would you rather be an investor in a “professional” production like Madame Web which was very well produced by well known people and studios and lost a high 8 figure amount, or invested in a YouTube channel that appears to be 20 something friends “bumbling their way to content production” that reliably rakes in millions.
It may look bumbling and disorganized, but they are consistently producing the most viewed content on YouTube and making millions.
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.
Anyone in any of these media industries will happily tell you that what gets made next is heavily dependent on what is being consumed now. If you want to sell books, you’re going to do a lot better writing sports romances for 30 somethings or romance fantasy aimed at slightly above young adult. There’s a lot of that coming out and it’s based on the success of Heated Rivalry, ACOTAR and Fourth Wing.
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.
https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6623b7720b009050313e701c/...
(Very interesting read!)