MrBeast Talks ‘Beast Games’ Season 2 and how he built his YouTube empire

Jimmy Donaldson, known as MrBeast, has almost become synonymous with YouTube. With nearly 460 million subscribers, MrBeast is the most followed on the platform. Last year he launched his reality competition series, Beast Gameson Prime Video. With the show’s second season about to premiere, Donaldson sat down with Mashable executive producer Mark Stetson to discuss his rise to stardom, how he built his YouTube empire, and what we can all expect from the new season of Beast Games.

Early in his career, Donaldson saw the value of relying on YouTube as his primary outlet for his content. “Right now, 2% of humanity’s time is spent on YouTube. When I was 11 years old, I had no idea YouTube would grow this big. An accident? Yes. The luckiest thing that happened to me was that I fell in love with creating YouTube videos. In the last 16 years, some media died and YouTube grew exponentially. I was very lucky that what I fell in love with and devoted my time to life, develops endlessly.”

Donaldson has turned his passion for video creation into a major content empire. Not only does he have the most subscribed channel on Youtube, but he is also the third most followed creator on TikTok. Jimmy has launched several brands, founded nonprofits, and now has his own reality competition series on Prime Video.

The second season of Beast Games premiered on January 7, with a hundred of the smartest people in the world versus a hundred of the strongest people in the world fighting for a $5 million prize. The show set several Guinness World Records, including: largest physical prize on set ($5 million) and most money won in a single episode of a competitive reality television show ($2.02 million).

A major adjustment that Donaldson was passionate about implementing between seasons of Beast Games was to focus more on the emotional drama the contestants faced between challenges. “A lot of people wanted to know more about the contestants. In Season 2, the first three episodes, there’s a lot of shots in the town where they’re hanging out. It’s the contestants who are normal. Which is funny because we have all this footage of these big, multi-million dollar sets, doing these crazy things. People aren’t asking me to build more giant sets. They’re not asking me to make crazier games. They’re actually asking, in between those, to just show the competitors.

Donaldson has built his career on creating experiences that people have never seen on screen. Even when Donaldson started out, at age 11, he wanted to do things no one else had done. “That’s always been my goal: to create content that you can’t find anywhere else. If someone else has done it and you make it slightly different, it doesn’t seem as special. But if every video we make can’t be found anywhere else in the world, that’s something people notice. Donaldson feels a responsibility to his audience to respect this philosophy.

“I feel like I owe it to the audience to always try to mix things up and give them something they’ve never seen.”

The first three episodes of Beast Games Season 2 are currently streaming on Prime Video. Subsequent episodes will air weekly on Wednesdays.