MrBeast has revealed the reason he stopped making his most popular type of video.
When you're the most-subbed content creator on YouTube, there must be a lot of pressure to keep things fresh. In terms of Jimmy "MrBeast" Donaldson, his channel has grown exponentially from the early days of playing Minecraft and Call of Duty: Black Ops II in 2012.
MrBeast really started making a name for himself around 2015 thanks to his "Worst Intros on YouTube" videos, and after amassing over 30,000 subscribers in 2016, he dropped out of university to pursue a full-time career with YouTube.
These days, MrBeast's 342 million subscribers can tune in to watch him try to launch cannonballs through yachts, get buried alive, and build a Willy Wonka-inspired chocolate factory.
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His most popular video of all time is his 2021 recreation of Squid Game, and while that's since expanded into Amazon's own Beast Games TV series, much of Donaldson's popularity remains on YouTube.
Even though MrBeast's Squid Game copycat is his most-watched YouTube video, there's a recurring kind of video that appears to be his most popular.
A quick scan of Donaldson's 'most popular' tab will show several '$1 versus...' videos. Here, MrBeast typically takes us from the lowest end of the spectrum through to some jaw-droppingly expensive choices.
His third-most-popular video ever is "$1 vs $500,000 Plane Ticket!", while his fourth is "$1 vs $1,000,000,000 Yacht!" You might've noticed that Donaldson doesn’t do these videos as much as he used to, and as Income Infinity points out, there's a specific reason for it. Speaking to The Colin and Samir Show's Samir Chaudry, MrBeast admitted the popularity of the '$1 versus...' videos doesn't mean he’s going to flood his channel with them.
When Chaudry said that MrBeast showed him pretty much all the thumbnails for 2024, he noticed that there was a distinct lack of the '$1 versus videos' and pointed out there were no upcoming ones planned.
Donaldson simply said: "I'm not doing them anymore."
Chaudry asked: "When do you abandon a format that's doing that well?"
MrBeast explained: "Every year, we've had formats that do really well, but if I just kept doing the formats that were crushing back in 2020, I wouldn't be where I am now."
"Eventually, they would fizzle out."
Even if the '$1 versus...' videos are a thing of the past, Donaldson is looking ahead: "I'm a big believer in ending on a format while it's not too old.
"It's not to say I won't do another '$1 versus...', I might do one here and there, but if I did like another five, probably around the third or fourth, people would start to be like, 'Okay, I've seen 10 of these.'"
Concluding that he has so many viral ideas he wants to bring to life, MrBeast reiterates he can't just rely on churning out the same old content just because he knows it does well.
Instead of doing eight '$1 versus...' videos, he says he'd rather do something more 'original and creative'.
Not everyone was happy with his response, with one critic writing: "Honestly, that format is better than his current ‘surviving’ challenges that are practically just the same things."
Another added: "The Sidemen need to watch this, also the hide and seek videos are dead."
'$1 versus' fans didn't have to wait long, as he most recently uploaded "$1 vs $500,000 Experiences!" in November 2024.