MrBeast tested Elon Musk’s theory and took home $250,000
By Clare Duffy, CNN
New York (CNN) — Influencer MrBeast said on Monday that he had made more than $250,000 from one video posted to X, in a sign of just how much major internet personalities stand to make from the social platform’s new ad revenue sharing program.
“MY FIRST X VIDEO MADE OVER $250,000!” MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, said in a post on the platform. He also shared what appeared to be a screenshot of X’s creator payment screen, showing the post had earned $263,655.
X owner Elon Musk in July launched a program to share part of the revenue from ads displayed in the replies to high performing content with the creators who post it, so long as they subscribe to the platform’s premium service.
The program aimed to encourage more creators to post high quality content to X that would be appealing to advertisers, as the company struggled to revive its core ad business. It also put X more in line with rival social media companies, including Meta, YouTube and TikTok, which all have systems to pay creators for the traffic and ad revenue they help to generate.
MrBeast — who became famous for his highly produced YouTube videos — had said last month that he didn’t plan to regularly post his work to X.
“My videos cost millions to make and even if they got a billion views on X it wouldn’t fund a fraction of it,” he said on X, in response to a request from Musk asking him to post his videos on the platform.
But last week, MrBeast decided to test the X ad revenue sharing program by posting one of his old videos, about trying out various expensive cars, to the platform. As of Tuesday, the video had more than 160 million views, according to X.
Following his payment from X, MrBeast said in a post on the platform that he planned to give away the money he earned to “10 random people that repost this and follow me” on X. He did not indicate whether he plans to continue sharing videos on the platform.
The payout to MrBeast indicates that creators can earn meaningful cash on X’s nascent program, even though the company’s ad business is markedly smaller than its rivals’. But even MrBeast himself cautioned that other creators might not have the same experience.
“But it’s a bit of a facade,” he said in the post about his earnings. “Advertisers saw the attention it was getting and bought ads on my video (I think) and thus my revenue per view is prob higher than what you’d experience.”
MrBeast’s payout was also likely boosted thanks to his significant audience on the platform, which may have meant his post, and the ads beneath it, received strong engagement. MrBeast has more than 27.5 million followers on X, well above the follower counts of other well-known influencers like Logan Paul and Charli D’Amelio.
However, not everyone is pleased with X’s new creator program.
Former law enforcement officer-turned-conservative political commentator Dan Bongino, who was banned from YouTube for posting Covid-19 misinformation in 2022, on Tuesday posted a screenshot to X showing that he’d received a payment from the platform of just $379 and calling the payout to MrBeast “shady.”
Critics of X have also raised alarms that paying X Premium subscribers, who already have their posts boosted by the platform’s algorithm, could encourage them to post more inflammatory or offensive content in an effort to garner more engagement.
Progressive media watchdog Media Matters, for example, reported in November that an X user who had praised Adolf Hitler had posted about receiving around $3,000 in payouts from X’s ad revenue sharing program. (Separately, X is suing Media Matters over a report that found advertisements for major brands running alongside pro-Nazi content; Media Matters has defended its work and vowed to fight the lawsuit.)
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