YouTube’s biggest creator, MrBeast, said he will give away all of the $250,000 he just earned on X.
“I’m gonna give 10 random people that repost this and follow me $25,000 for fun,” he said. “I’ll pick the winners in 72 hours.”
MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, has 234 million subscribers on YouTube. The 25-year-old is known for his philanthropy, social experiments, and various entrepreneurial ventures, and shot to fame for ambitious stunts, including his own recreation of “Squid Game.”
On January 15, Donaldson said he would be testing out how much ad revenue one of his videos could earn on X. This came after months of X’s owner, Elon Musk, trying to woo him to the platform.
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Musk previously stated creators on X earned $5 million in the first rollout of payments. Andrew Tate was one personality who said he earned a significant amount under the scheme.
Donaldson had previously declined the invitation to post on X exclusively, citing better ad revenue on YouTube.
But he decided to give it a try with an old video titled “$1 vs $100,000,000 Car!”
The video has amassed 216 million views since being posted on YouTube four months ago. On X, as of January 23, it has been viewed 161 million times.
On January 22, Donaldson revealed he had made over $250,000 on his first X video.
However, he and other X users thought the experiment may not have been a fair one.
“It’s a bit of a facade,” Donaldson said. “Advertisers saw the attention it was getting and bought ads on my video (I think) and thus my revenue per view is prob higher than what you’d experience.”
In the replies, some creators said they earned significantly less despite earning millions of impressions on their own content.
“Elon literally gave you all our ad rev cuz we got NOTHING,” one user wrote.
Another said: “this explains why my revenue was cut in half.”
“This implies $593 dollars per 1 million impressions which is way more than what most people are seeing,” one response reads. “Definitely artificially inflated.”
Musk seemed to respond to the claims he rigged the results in an X post on January 20. He replied to a post from a Tesla club’s account saying the “mainstream media” didn’t want to acknowledge the success of Donaldson’s experiment.
“To the best of my knowledge, we have done nothing to amplify his viewers,” Musk wrote.
X did not respond to a request for comment from BI.
