In 2016, I had hundreds of thousands more subscribers than MrBeast at the beginning of the year. He passed me around the middle of the year. I remember his early videos before everybody followed him, like giving big tips on Twitch and giving a homeless guy $10,000. I remember seeing him come up. Now it's 10 years later, and MrBeast is the most subscribed YouTube channel in the world. Lots of days I get up to go create for my subscribers on YouTube, and I think, what have I done with my life? If you're a content creator, I'm going to explore how MrBeast and I ended up on such different paths. How was I so far ahead of him, and what choices did he make?
He went all in on YouTube. I treated it as marketing.
He made the choice to go all in on YouTube. For years before that, he had been preparing better than I was. He had been spending hours just talking and hanging out with his friends on YouTube, and he obsessed over YouTube alone. In 2016, I also had millions of followers. I had millions of followers on Facebook, and I had hundreds of thousands across the rest of the platforms, like Twitch, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. I focused on building this broad, big online presence and showing up everywhere, with hundreds of thousands of people taking my courses on Udemy. So for me, YouTube was just a means to make money. YouTube was not the end-all, be-all. It wasn't the best opportunity. YouTube was just for marketing. I treated YouTube, Facebook, and all these other platforms like they were there to get people to buy my courses and pay for coaching. I looked at all these platforms not as the end goal themselves, but as the means to the end. My subscribers, to me, were a means to an end, and all my learning was based around generating short-term income. I wasn't thinking about how to make this grow over the next 10 years.
I also had a one- or two-year-old daughter in 2016, so I was paying the bills for my family with my six-figure income from YouTube and all the courses I was selling. I wasn't reinvesting all the money I was making into my YouTube channel. Jimmy decided, as soon as he started making some money, to constantly double down and double down. I wasn't going to do that. He makes $10,000, gives it to a homeless man, turns that into a whole bunch of views, then a $20,000 sponsorship, and then takes that and makes a bigger and bigger video. The approach I took was much more conservative, and it has totally flopped in most ways over time compared to the strategy MrBeast took.
Most people who tried the MrBeast strategy lost
However, I imagine that most people trying to do what Jimmy did, doubling down all the time, lost at some point, completely quit, and gave up on YouTube and content creation. I've seen a number of stories of people who tried to do what Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, did. I've seen stories of people who took $70,000, put it all into trying to make one video, made nothing at all, and wasted their life savings trying to be a YouTuber. You've never heard of them. Meanwhile, I did support my family as the full-time income provider for years, but my YouTube channel actually continued to shrink over time, and I eventually deleted all my social media channels and my YouTube.
I deleted them because I got to see that online content creation has turned into this thing where you do anything it takes to get people to watch your video, and you promote the narratives you're supposed to promote, like worshipping money, and in crypto, promoting all these coins to people who end up getting ripped off. YouTube looks like one big psyop to me at this point. It's designed to get people to stop thinking critically and to trade their time for junk-food entertainment that doesn't add value to their minds. My goal with my content was to help people be empowered and to help people learn. I've tried to do that, and yet it has not paid very well. Whereas MrBeast was one of the first YouTubers to decide, I'm going to do anything to get as many views as possible and purely try to entertain people with my content.
He also did a better job of challenging himself. I kept things much more comfortable for myself. What impressed me with a lot of his videos is that he'd bury himself for seven days, or he'd do these crazy challenges that were very physically or mentally difficult, and he strengthened himself. I was focused on providing for a family and keeping things a lot more comfortable. I stayed out of getting into stuff that was too dangerous most of the time, and then I got canceled when I did get into that stuff on other platforms, and the algorithm just destroyed me.
One kind of content versus everything on one channel
MrBeast did a great job of focusing on one kind of sensational content that would get people involved. I tried to teach people everything from gardening to marketing. I would do vlogs, crypto, and live-streamed video games, and I did all that on one channel. That used to work a lot better in the algorithm. But MrBeast was studying the YouTube algorithm endlessly, every single day, obsessed with winning in the algorithm at any cost. If some of the things he did hadn't worked out, you might not have heard of him today. Even today, he says in his videos that he's leveraged, that there's debt, that he needs a huge amount of money coming in all the time, and that he's constantly reinvesting all the money that comes in.
Now, I have some advantages. In some ways, my situation is much better, because I can travel and go almost anywhere without people recognizing me and creating a big fuss. I've had my share of attention. What I've created online has been seen over a billion times, so I've certainly gotten a number of views online, but most places I go, I'm anonymous. I can go to the store without a crowd forming. To some degree, Jimmy has made it so he may never get to have a normal life again. He can't just go to the grocery store without the store being swarmed within five minutes and everybody telling their friends that MrBeast is in the store. He's made it so he can't have what you might think of as a normal life. A lot of us think a sensational life might be better than a normal one, but it has some serious downsides. I've gotten enough of a taste of that with the little bit of internet fame I've had to see that it's not so fun. You are always attracting drama and crazy people. I'm sure he has a team of lawyers dealing with all the crazy things that end up happening because his content reaches so many people.
Some days I feel like I totally failed
So it's hard for me to create going forward. Some days I feel like I've just totally failed. I was in this race and I was winning. PewDiePie had way more subscribers than MrBeast back then, and some of his earlier videos were him trying to get PewDiePie to notice him. He would go to any lengths to get people to notice him and clout-chase PewDiePie. I'm doing this video today for content creators to look at where you're going in the future. The reality of content creation is often pretty ugly. If I had taken a path similar to MrBeast's, in some ways it would have destroyed my ordinary family life. He films crazy amounts every day, and that's not something you can do very well with a wife and little kids. If I'd taken that path, I certainly could have just paid for everything, but I wouldn't have gotten to be present in my kids' lives the way I have been able to be present now.
Going forward, I'm thinking about what I want. Do I want that? I also had a lot of resistance to doing what it takes to be famous. Lots of times I've seen that if you do this, you could get famous, or you could get a lot more viewers. And I'd think, but I don't want to do that. I don't want to support that narrative or push this thing. I don't want to do this because I don't think it's good for people. I don't think it's the right thing to do. The challenge for a lot of us as content creators is that what will get you a lot of views is often not good for people to watch, or not within your own integrity as a person. I've spent years being a frustrated content creator, feeling like I never have enough views and never have enough subscribers, but then I won't do what it takes to get more views and subscribers.
When is it enough?
Going forward, the challenge is constantly this: how do I create content that I feel good about, and then how do I feel like I have enough? What's crazy is that MrBeast is on a quest to get to a billion subscribers. Why do you need a billion subscribers? Isn't half a billion enough? At what point do you say, okay, this is good enough, I'm happy with this, and I don't need to constantly grow and grow and do anything to get more and more? A lot of people have been critical of MrBeast for making very corporate content. I enjoy his videos. I've watched some of them, and they're entertaining. But at the same time, do I ever walk away from a MrBeast video feeling better? I've noticed that lots of times I feel worse after watching one of his videos.
That's the trick, and this is what's tough with the human mind. In the short term, the junk food we eat and the junk information we take in actually feel good while we're doing it, but they feel bad after we're done. What's challenging with content on YouTube, especially, and on all these other platforms, is that the content that feels good to take in often feels bad after you're done taking it in, and the content that feels bad while you're taking it in often leaves you feeling good and more empowered. Sometimes my videos leave people feeling worse, because I challenge what they believe. Then people's minds associate that: I felt bad watching Jerry's videos, so I'm not going to watch them, and I feel good watching MrBeast's videos, so I'm going to watch those. But often that's the trick. Learning something new, expanding your mind, and becoming a better person actually feels bad at first. It's uncomfortable, it's unknown, and it can be scary.
Ice cream, and the after-effects of content
Predictable junk food, like ice cream, is a great example. I generally don't eat ice cream. I don't have any ultra-processed foods like that in my house: no ice cream, no cookies, no candy, no cakes, none of that. I make rare exceptions on somebody's birthday, but I eat ultra-healthy. In the short term, if I look at an ice cream cone, it certainly may taste sensational, but the after-effects are undesirable. I've been looking at my content and thinking, what are the after-effects of watching my content for people? I want to make content that genuinely leaves people better off than before they watched it, which often with entertainment is not the case. My kids got addicted to YouTube. They watched a lot of MrBeast videos and all these Roblox and Minecraft videos, and afterward they would crash and fight and start crying and just be nuts.
I still see that my mind holds the idea that what MrBeast has done, getting all these hundreds of millions of subscribers, is better than what I've done. But if you think about it, how many people can do what he does with all those numbers? And is the content he's creating actually adding value to the world and making people's lives better? Obviously, there's a lot of content he does where that is the case. But if you look at all of it, all the viewers, is MrBeast's content making the world a better place? That's certainly up for debate, and I don't have a fixed position on it.
I'd like to think my content has helped people expand their minds, reconsider their choices and their lives, and make some positive changes. Lots of people switched to whole-plant vegan based on me doing that. Lots of people have gotten new ideas and empowered approaches to life from watching my content. I've talked to people on jerrybanfield.com over and over again who say, your content changed my life when it came to dating, when it came to money, when it came to eating and health. That book you read and talked about changed things for me. I've helped a bunch of people all over the world get sober and cut their addictions with my content, and I've talked to a bunch of people who say it helped them be more honest, open people with integrity. And yet, despite knowing that, my mind will say, you're a failure. I'll have the thought: look at you, you were ahead of MrBeast, and you've been a total failure with your content over the last decade.
The judgment metric is followers
As content creators, a lot of us only judge our success by how much money we make and how many followers we have. The first question, whenever I tell a woman I'm on a date with that I make content, is what kind of content do I make and how many followers do I have. That's the judgment metric. That's why I quit everything last year. It all felt pointless. It felt like there's no opportunity for me to create content that genuinely makes somebody's life better, and that all the algorithms reward is junk food that destroys people's minds. To me, the choice seems to be: do I want to try to unplug people from the matrix and truly help somebody have a better life with my content, or do I want to say and do anything necessary for me to get paid, get followers, and get views? That creates a pretty dysphoric picture of content creation, but that's how I see it.
At the same time, I am trying to create the best content I can that genuinely helps people and brings more people to hear my message. I'm happy to have whatever amount of followers I get, as long as my content is genuinely helping you feel better after you watch it, so that the after-effects on your life are better. The other night I watched some Instagram reels on this Eminem song I love, "FACK." The reels were funny. I was laughing and enjoying them, and then I felt worse. I got a little dopamine hit and I got to laugh, but did that add value to my life? Did I just trade my time for it? The content creator didn't get almost anything. The platforms themselves got the value. And what did I do with my time? I laugh and I joke, but it'd be better to laugh and joke with people in person instead of on a phone. You can find more of my thinking on this in my YouTube Coaching playlist.
There are a lot of major conflicts that come up being a content creator. If you want to talk about those, I'm here to work with you. I love working with other content creators, navigating the most complex issues like money, fans, integrity, and ongoing creativity. I'm here to help with whatever you want.
Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time.