MrBeast's 'purple cow' rule he lives by to get 200M views per video
MrBeast is undeniably the king of YouTube right now, soaring to the top of the most-subscribed-to list while earning hundreds of millions of views with every upload, yet there's one rule he swears by that could be the secret to his success.
It takes a lot of luck to achieve success on social media, yet most of the biggest creators have found an audience by grinding away with their content from the very beginning.
The origin behind Jimmy "MrBeast" Donaldson is much likely many YouTube creators that rose up around the same time, as he got his start over a decade ago with Minecraft, Call of Duty, and other gaming videos before delving into challenge-style content.
He would not only make countless videos about other creators, but made his big break by counting to 100,000 in one long video, stretching quite literally for an entire day.
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Since then, Donaldson has gone on to invest lots of money into wild tasks and challenges that often involve staying in one place for an absurdly long period of time, or battling it out against your peers.
One thing has stayed the same for years though and that runs though every single piece of content that he releases. This one 'rule' as he calls it ensures that each new video is a guaranteed success, and he has outlined the process in an interview with Theo Von.
Detailing what he calls the 'Purple Cow' rule, MrBeast explains:
"A big part of getting 100 million views theoretically on a view is, is it something someone has seen before or not? Like there's this TED Talk I watched one time and he was talking about how if you're driving down the road and you just see a cow, you're probably not even gonna look at it.
"Who cares, you've seen them all the time. But if you're driving down the road and there's a purple cow, you're going to look four times, you're gonna remember that, someone could ask you a year later and you'd be like 'saw a purple cow'."
It takes advantage of people's innate curiosity when it comes to things they might not expect, as while not everyone will be interested in everything you put out, if you present it in a way that initially grabs their attention, it might be something that they latch onto.
"The only difference is that it's purple," Donaldson continued, "and it's kinda the same way on social media, where if you're scrolling through videos and it's something you've seen before, nothing too crazy, it's almost like you should visualize this like the equivalent of someone seeing a cow.
"But if it's something they've never seen before, like you putting a bunker underground and two people living in it, that is the equivalent of a purple cow on social media."
Of course, the more time goes on the harder it gets to not only stand out but do something that's not been done before, but MrBeast has shown that it can still be achieved even at the very top, resulting in continued success across his regularly released videos.