Famed YouTube creator, MrBeast, has reached 100 million subscribers. He celebrated the moment with a live stream.
MrBeast has officially become the 5th YouTuber in history to have reached 100 million subscribers. He also becomes the 2nd American YouTuber and 2nd non brand YouTube channel to do so. MrBeast celebrated the moment with a live stream. A recording of the moment was also posted:
The stream showed a live subscriber count. MrBeast admitted that he didn’t think reacting to the moment on live stream all the way through because there were moments were his subscriber count dropped. MrBeast was somewhat annoyed at what he called “trolls” who were unsubscribing right before he reached 100 million. Still, the numbers did start going up again. About 1.1 million users (including us) watched the moment live as well.
MrBeast did take a moment to reflect on how he started. He dismissed people saying that he was a trust fund kid and spoke about how he started with pretty much nothing. What he described was him starting at 11 years old making “crappy” video’s at first. He deleted his channel, but started it back up a little while later. As he finished high school, the realized that he would eventually need a job. He rejected that notion and wound uploading numerous videos in an effort to avoid having to go to a more traditional low wage job.
Apparently, what he did worked enough to keep him out of the traditional work force as his subscriber count started going up. When he hit 100 million subscribers, he showed his subscriber count history, talking about how he did have growth throughout the 2010’s, but his subscriber count really started to take off in 2018. That was where he says most people think he started was around 2018, but he had been doing this for much longer.
There is a lot of stark things to consider here. For one, this is a subscriber count that traditional TV services can only dream of. Yes, subscribing on YouTube has no cost whereas TV subscriptions have a cost, but still, when you see YouTubers get such high subscription counts, it really hammers home how much things have shifted away from more traditional mediums. Indeed, there is no shortage of stories about how traditional TV is hemorrhaging. Here’s a sample of the headlines we’ve seen recently:
Comcast shares slide after the cable giant fails to add broadband subscribers for first time ever
Sky revenues decline amid falling subscribers
Charter Loses 226,000 Pay TV Subs in Second Quarter
Indeed, one of the most common complaint we’ve heard about cable TV is the fact that there is “nothing to watch”. TV shows so often have a low risk formula where “if it works in the past, it’ll work in the future”. That’s why there are so many shows that try to copy past successes. When reality TV took off in 2000, the market became completely flooded with reality TV shows. It didn’t seem to matter to executives that people were getting sick and tired of it, only that it was cheap to produce and cheap to get out of the door.
While the over saturation of reality TV has tapered a little, traditional TV was seemingly filled with ideas that were just not that interesting. A bigger and bigger question became, “what is the point of watching TV?” The two big reasons that seem to be left were news broadcasts and sports. News broadcasting has increasingly been on the receiving end of backlash while online news started filling in the void. So, really, all that is left is traditional live sports TV. Even then, those traditional live sporting events have been increasingly trying to inch their way over to online streaming as well.
Online streaming services have been able to pick up the slack a little. Netflix, for instance, has become a dominant force in the streaming for quite a while, though competition in recent years from traditional broadcasters forging ahead with their own services meant that subscriptions started to fall. Of course, one thing Netflix did have was the ability to produce content that would be considered “too risky” for traditional broadcasters. Still, there was that experimentation and Netflix ultimately found success because of it.
That, ultimately, provides a hint as to why YouTubers are growing increasingly successful. Digital first creators don’t need permission to produce content. Like the Internet at large (at least in the 2000’s and early 2010’s), creators can just produce what they want, upload it to the Internet, and see how it does. While there is always risk, there is also reward. That is what a lot of YouTube creators are seeing today. More viewers are increasingly turning to these platforms and seeing what people come up with.
As more success stories hit more and more, more creators become increasingly interested in turning to platforms like YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok. As more creators move to those platforms, more viewers wind up following as a result. It becomes a self feeding system of success.
As a result, the question, “what’s the point of watching TV?” becomes an increasingly big question. As boring TV continues to dominate the airwaves, answers become increasingly in short supply. For the time being, it doesn’t look like this trend is going to slow down any time soon. That will no doubt be great news for online creators who would love to be the next channel to have 100 million subscribers.
Such an accomplishment of 100 million subscribers does, indeed, deserve congratulations. We said it during the live stream chat, but chances are, it was missed. So, we’ll say it here: congratulations MrBeast on 100 million subscribers.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
