Inside MrBeast's $1 Billion YouTube Business

Seated among 4 highly successful entrepreneurs and investors, this is how easy Jimmy Donaldson (better known as his internet alias: MrBeast) finds asserting his chocolate bar brand Feastables revenue in 2023:

A couple of $100Ms, huh? Feastables generated over a reported multi $100M since it’s launch. The surge of creator-led brands in the past 2 years have been phenomenal. In fact, there are primarily 2 ways to go about building businesses on YouTube- joining forces with a brand whose values, ethics & missions resembles your own; but what happens when brands can’t afford you anymore, you didn’t seem to fit the brand’s brief or maybe you don’t want to do that deal in the first place?

And with such uncompleted understanding of your numbers:

How in the world are they building such massively successful brands?

This is where operators show up. These are guys interested in solving problems that comes with building a brand. Jim Murray, the CEO & Co-founder at Feastables, ex President at RXBAR, Senior Manager at PepsiCo and PRIME Hydration affiliated with Congo Brands; are some of the best operators in the space.

The scale at which these brands are operating right now is absolutely humongous and the recent deal between NBA team Charlotte Hornets and Feastables as official jersey patch partner, made Jimmy the first content creator ever to sponsor an NBA team; bridging the gap between a creator-led brand and an NBA franchise. The internet is reporting this deal to be a $5 million per year as the previous jersey patch sponsor, LendingTree was paying. Feastables might be paying higher just because how massive MrBeast’s reach is or would have negotiated a great deal as he don’t really needs the NBA or precisely need to spend on advertising since he owns the world’s second biggest distribution platform.

I highly believe this partnership will be pioneering more collaborations of this kind; integrating the contrast between mainstream sports and YouTube culture.

This is an insanely strategic long-term multi-year deal, as the collaboration extends beyond the ink jersey patch deal to media backdrops for Hornets’ press events and exciting digital content opportunities for fans, transforming The Hornets Shop into an exclusive place for acquiring jerseys featuring the coveted Feastables patch.

The Feastables logo is set to extend beyond the primary team jersey and will also feature prominently across all its affiliated teams. This includes Hornets Venom GT, an NBA 2K League esports team. This allows MrBeast to maximize his exposure, reaching a highly engaged young online core audience.

Feastables has just hit the market with a revamped brand design, new and improved formula and a completely different mold, which the team has been working very hard on over the last 8 months.

All this establishes a solid base for MrBeast's enduring objective of becoming the number 1 snack brand on the planet.

MrBeast has gotten way too big for brands to advertise with him, he just gets so many views per video that to afford a single brand deal with him would cost more than half of the brand’s yearly marketing budget.

The actual dollar value of partnering with him is just incalculable at this point and is on an unprecedented scale. How will the brands make sure he’s compensated in a way that reflects how effective his content is for the brands; he just gets so many views per video.

This is the reason he invests so much time and capital building his own projects; his distribution platforms, Feastables and other business ventures that he is planning to grow long-term.

The YouTube genius was looking to raise $150M at a $1.5B valuation back in October 2022. With a combined social following of over 600 million, MrBeast is currently running the world’s largest business empire on YouTube.

Averaging an RPM of $5 across all his english channels, accumulating over 3 billion views, ONLY IN THE MONTH OF OCTOBER 2023 he made an estimated revenue of $1.5 million solely from Adsense. However, his YouTube enterprise extends far beyond the confines of a single language. At the global scale, his 13 international channels amassed a collective viewership of over 70 million during the same period. Even when applying a discreet $2.5 RPM average across these channels, the revenue generated exceeded $175,000. In sum, the total revenue generated by his YouTube endeavors stands at an approximate $1.6 million. Remember, this too in a single month and we would never know what his best month looks like.

Feastables sold 1 million bars in the first month of sales, reviving the boring chocolate industry by innovating the space. While there’s absolutely no data on how much revenue Feastables is actually generating, MrBeast at The All-In Summit said, they will do a couple of $100Ms in 2023.

But MrBeast wants to move on from his first big venture, MrBeast Burger but for that he needs a court order. He is suing Virtual Dining Concepts, which partnered with him to launch a fast food brand in 2020, he is hoping to shutter the brand. “Because Virtual Dining Concepts was more focused on rapidly expanding the business as a way to pitch the virtual restaurant model to other celebrities for its own benefit, it was not focused on controlling the quality of the MrBeast Burger customer experience and products,” states the complaint by MrBeast’s team. This is unfortunate but let’s hope Jimmy, Reed and the team resolves this dispute.

His business model can be succinctly encapsulated in the following statement: Fostering the development of organic distribution channels to reduce CAC as much as in the long term, while significantly increasing LTV, with the ultimate goal of steering customers towards his legacy companies, such as Feastables.