Mr Beast: The Smartest Youtuber Alive

1. Mr Beast is ruthlessly unique

If you are creating the exact same content as someone else, you are already losing. If you look at any of Mr Beast’s videos, whether from present day or 10 years ago, they are all absurdly unique. Here are just a couple:

• “Cutting table in half with plastic knives” (2017, 3.6M views)

• “I got bored of studying so this happened” (2016, 382k views)

• “Saying Keep Net Neutrality for 10 hours” (2018, 2.1M views)

• “I bought a car using only pennies” (2018, 26M views)

• “Make this video the most liked video on Youtube” (2019, 129M views)

• “Hi me in 5 years” (2021, 98M views)

These are all incredibly random — yet people want to watch them because they’re so unique. And notice one very important thing — these videos don’t require millions of dollars to make! Mr Beast is known for blowing insane amounts of money per video, but when he just got started, he didn’t have a penny to his name. It does not take money to be unique and creative.

2. Mr Beast’s videos are “default unscrollable”

Even if your video has amazing content, it doesn’t matter at all unless people click on it. Mr Beast has a simply philosophy — if you do not have an unshakable urge to click on his video just by reading the title, it’s a failure. If you’re a follower of Mr Beast, you know what I mean — every single time you see a new Mr Beast video, it’s almost impossible not to click.

So ask yourself: “How can I make my videos default unscrollable?” Default unscrollable means that anyone, by default, will not scroll past your video after seeing your title or thumbnail. Mr Beast has several secrets to make sure that all of his videos are default unscrollable:

• Use eye-catching numbers: It doesn’t have to be money-related. Whether it’s saying Logan Paul’s name 100,000 times or surviving for 50 hours in a maximum security prison, numbers tend to catch people’s attention better than words.

• Push the boundaries of reality: People tend to watch content to escape from reality and experience the impossible. Mr Beast has titles that you just can’t imagine ever happening in real life. Titles like “I spent 50 hours buried alive”, “Going through the same drive thru 1,000 times”, or “I ate $100,000 golden ice cream” — all things that us normal civilians can never imagine happening in real life. The human brain is simple: We see something beyond reality, we click.

• Flashy, clear thumbnails: We cannot emphasize this enough — spend the time to make your thumbnails amazing. If you look at any of Mr Beast’s thumbnails, they feature brilliant colors, eye-catching visuals, and a clear, honest representation of what to expect in the video. This is the opposite of “clickbait” — it’s radical transparency.

3. Mr Beast makes every second count

Once you click on a Mr Beast video, you will be barraged with interesting content at every second of the video. All Youtube watchers are human, and all humans in the 21st century have the attention span of a goldfish. So if we lose interest for just a second, we will most likely exit the video. That’s why Mr Beast makes sure that every second of the video has one of the following:

• The exact content that the title promised

• A fast, eye-catching transition to another scene at just the right moment when your attention span was starting to wane

That’s it. If you stick to those 2 things throughout your own videos, I promise that people will stick around longer.