The Trap MrBeast fell it

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3 years ago

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The trap @MrBeast fell into. ⬇️

You guys voted for this thread, but a little disclaimer before we start.

Many creators are obsessed with the micro aspects of things (CTR, Watch Time, Retention, AVD etc..). To me, these metrics mean nothing if the macro aspect hasn't been taken care of.

It's easy to say "it was obvious" after an event has occurred. So this thread will try to give you more perspective on a macro scale and try to see where the MrBeast channel is heading IF no changes are made. Let's see if the future will make me right or wrong.

Attention is a currency and a zero-sum game. If you spend 1 mn watching Pewdiepie, you can't spend the same minute watching another creator. This means for every winner, there must be a loser. It is extremely important to understand the attention market if you want to beat it.

To understand it, we will use the Gaussian Bell Curve. If you're not familiar with this, fear not maths haters! I will make it easy to understand, I swear. 😁

Just like any market, this is how creators are distributed in this curve. Most of them are in the middle trying to survive (64.2%), 13.6% are doing well, 2.1% are doing very well and 0.1% are owning. @MrBeast is from the latter, but we will come back to this later.

Here, we will think in terms of "remarkability". The more remarkable your content, the better chance it has to beat the attention market. Every single video can be mapped somewhere here. The more "highly remarkable" videos you can pull in a row, the faster your growth will be.

This is why I always say that to beat the market, you must not think like the market. You can't be remarkable if you're copying everyone else. You must find an edge, a way to be unique. And this is what Jimmy did.

At first, Jimmy started like everyone else, somewhere here. Trying to survive for years. His content was just like thousands of small channels, not remarkable.

Until he found an edge. Something 99.9% won't do. He finally became remarkable (note that remarkable is a neutral word here, remarkable is not necessarily tied to quality).

This is where things started to become interesting, after milking this concept for a while, he (probably) understood that while the first time it was remarkable, the more he does it, the less remarkable it becomes.

So he found a new way of becoming remarkable: Money. The rest is history.

This edge he's found (doubling down the money every time) is almost impossible for anyone to replicate. The format however, that's another story.

As I have some trading background, here are some lessons I learned that can 100% be applied to the attention market:

It is very similar to financial markets: - Just because an edge is profitable, it does not guarantee it will be profitable going forward - If a profitable angle becomes known, then the price will eventually adjust until it becomes an unprofitable angle.

Replace "price" with "views" and you'll understand market dynamics on YouTube. It is crucial to understand when you build your strategies, because remember: a plan is not a strategy. twitter.com/wono_strategy/status/1571758460336832513

MrBeast becoming the #1 on YouTube created two problems for his channel: 1️⃣ The MrBeastification (I highly suggest you watch this video from @Pinleyy youtube.com/watch?v=gauf6ZmIXxs) 2️⃣ He became his own competitor

These two points are a red flag 🚩 for a creator, this is where you must start to shift toward a new edge. Why? Because people get used to everything, even millions of $. And this is where he trapped himself.

The market will always want more, it's an endless demand for something bigger and more remarkable. By becoming his own competitor, @MrBeast created a bubble of attention that reached its all-time high and started to burst (in my opinion) with his Squid Game video.

This is paradoxical, but his most viewed video trapped him. As people become more and more resistant to money content (remarkably speaking), they will expect more from him. He will be forced to match the cost of his videos to the demand for remarkable content. The problem is:

It cost him almost $4M and was probably closer to breaking even than profitable (even with the beneficial side effects). It's going to be incredibly difficult to beat in terms of remarkability since he trend-jacked the worldwide squid game hype (which was way bigger than him).

The attention market is ruthless and money-wise he reached a ceiling. This can't scale forever. So he has to find a way to make remarkable content with less money.

He did use here and here his former edge (doing extreme stuff) but doing that consistently would be dangerous as it's way easier for the average Joe to copy (and even beat) but also not really fun to make (for obvious reasons).

His main channel is dangerously leaning towards the 50M average views (a point that wasn't hit since 130 videos or so). If he's not able to pull a banger within the next 10 videos you will start to see "MrBeast channel is dead" popping around.

That's the price to pay when you grow exponentially too fast. You become a trend, which is double-edged. You need to be really solid strategy-wise to convert all this growth into a solid base.

Note that I'm not taking into consideration the whole MrBeast ecosystem. There are many other aspects that could make him less dependent on his main channel (hopefully for him) such as Beast Burgers, Feastables, his side channels etc..

No matter what happened next, MrBeast has achieved something incredible so far and will remain in the history of youtube. I hope he will find a way to renew his content because there are a lot of possibilities in front of him to set it free from the money dictatorship.