The (lonely) king of the internet

• Australian rocker Nick Cave said he will be among the guests at today’s Coronation of King Charles III, along with Ant & Dec, Lionel Richie, Chinese vice president Han Zheng and President of the Philippines Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos. 
• London’s Met Police confirmed it will use controversial live facial recognition technology to identify potential troublemakers in the Coronation crowd.
• John Lewis said its £15 Coronation teddy was the best-selling edition of the “Lewis Bear” since its launch in 2005.

by Xavier Greenwood

Last week, 4,000 miles from Westminster Abbey, a different sort of monarch cemented his place as head of a kingdom. A 6ft 4” YouTuber from North Carolina became the first person to reach 150 million subscribers.

So what? This 24 year-old, who has racked up 25 billion views on one YouTube channel, has an estimated net worth of $500 million and claims to have rejected a billion-dollar offer for his empire, is the exception that proves the rule: young men can use silly online videos to generate huge wealth and fame without necessarily making the world worse. 

Who is he? MrBeast, aka Jimmy Donaldson, is an affable creator who has all but perfected the art of YouTube. He spent five years obsessively studying the site as a teenager after he was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, then started out making Minecraft videos with a dodgy mic and scraped $100 in two years. Fixating on the mechanics of virality – from optimum title lengths to the ideal thumbnail – by 2017 he was landing millions of views per video. Now he gets hundreds of millions.

But how? His video titles read like the boasts of a serial fabulist: “I Built Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory”, “I Adopted EVERY Dog in a Dog Shelter” and “I Paid A Real Assassin To Try To Kill Me.” They’re also an insight into his major selling points: absurdity, extremity and originality. But it was attention-grabbing “philanthropy” that really sent his channel into the stratosphere.

A virtuous circle. MrBeast gives away millions of dollars, sometimes at random to cheer up service workers but often as reward for ludicrous challenges: $20,000 for the last person to leave a pool of ramen noodles, $50,000 for the last to leave a revolving door, $1 million for the last to take their hand off a huge stack of money. Hundreds of millions of views bring in revenue through ads and sponsors, which fund more outlandish stunts, which generate even more cash to spend on future videos. According to LinkedIn, his production company employs 185 people.