Straight to the point

Jimmy Donaldson dropped out of a community college near his home in North Carolina at the age of 18 to crack one of the mysteries of modern life: what makes a video become a viral sensation on social media? Together with four similarly obsessed friends, he spent up to 20 hours a day studying the secrets of YouTube hits after becoming hooked posting footage playing games. The nerds analysed everything intensively: the algorithms, camera angles, lighting, pacing, thumbnails, viewer drop-off data. And clearly, the efforts paid off: today, eight years later, Donaldson’s MrBeast brand is the biggest star on the medium with 318 million subscribers. He is five times bigger than Taylor Swift on YouTube. 

Take-off began with daft endurance videos, such as spending 40 hours counting to 100,000 and watching a bad rap video repeatedly for 10 hours. As his audience grew, so did the scale and vision of his videos: crashing a train into a pit, stranding himself on a raft at sea for seven days, surviving for 50 hours in Antarctica. Then he began making serious money from advertisers and sponsors, finding the appeal of spraying around cash after handing $10,000 to “a random homeless guy” while insisting “this is not clickbait”. The latest MrBeast video features 100 identical twins competing for $250,000. It has had 53 million hits in two days.

Donaldson’s videos are slick and his success has made him rich. Forbes estimated he earned $54 million in 2022 — and his numbers have kept on surging. His burgeoning media empire, reportedly worth $700 million, shows the rising significance of YouTube, now the most popular source of content for television viewers in the United States. But in recent weeks he has been buffeted by controversies with revelations of racist comments made as a teenager, teen grooming allegations involving a transgender (now dismissed) co-host, and the launch of a lawsuit by five women against his production company and Amazon over claims they “systematically fostered a culture of misogyny and sexism” during filming of the world’s biggest reality show contest with 1,000 people competing for $5 million.

This is damaging — and not just because it might hinder the Amazon tie-up that lifts Donaldson to another level. MrBeast is built on his brand of benevolent niceness, with profits supposedly going “towards making the world a better place”. Having started out as a typical YouTube goofball, he became an internet superstar with acts of outlandish altruism. He doles out cars, houses, islands and yachts as well as cash. His videos boast of adopting a South African orphanage, helping paralysed dogs run, building 100 wells in Africa, feeding 10,000 people for Thanksgiving, paying a salary to everyone in a Ugandan village for a year. They have eye-catching titles such as: “1,000 Blind People See For The First Time” and “We Brought Water to Kenya”.

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This is performative philanthropy at its most cynical, glib and patronising, using disability and poverty as a platform to boost Donaldson’s own celebrity and wealth. His stunts promote the concept of simplistic solutions to challenging problems, wrapping the munificent American donor in a warm glow of benevolence as he drops in to spread a little of his MrBeast largesse to some lucky recipients. Inevitably, some charities have jumped on board — including, bizarrely, GiveDirectly, started by US economists to focus on data-driven interventions rather than more random MrBeast ideas such as “Giving 20,000 Shoes to Kids in Africa”.

Yet consider some of those stunts. Few things appeal more to well-meaning Westerners than needy orphans, so there is a boom business in unregulated and fake orphanages in poorer nations. Some are squalid, others fronts for abuse. Children are often lured from families with false promises of money, schooling or security. One recent Australian study examined this phenomenon of “orphanage trafficking” that “fabricated narratives” to attract funds from donors. Such concerns were raised by Lumos — a group founded by J.K. Rowling to end institutionalisation — with statements addressing MrBeast’s counterproductive focus: “Many orphanages across the world are set up to exploit children for profit, exposing children to harm and abuse. By promoting orphanages, even well-intentioned ones, we promote the work of those that are not, continuing the cycle of exploitation.”

Or take the issue of wells. Again, this might seem a sensible way for outsiders to help poorer communities. But the landscape of Africa is littered with donor-funded wells and water systems that failed due to lack of maintenance. This has long been recognised as a problem; one report 15 years ago found that £270 million had been wasted on building 50,000 rural water supply points that ended up broken on the continent. Thus one Kenyan activist praised MrBeast for shining a spotlight on the issue of clean water supplies, but pointed out the big issue was sustainability, saying her group worked in areas where six in 10 wells were broken. “People go back to drinking from the creek because there was no infrastructure put in place for follow-up maintenance for repair,” said Saran Kaba Jones, founder of Face Africa, which helps create locally-appropriate water supplies for communities.

Building such wells can be lucrative, however. One infuriated whistleblower passed me documents a few years ago showing that at least £16.8 million from a £25.4 million aid-backed scheme to install wells, water pumps and irrigation in some of Africa’s most deprived areas went to consultants pocketing rates above £600 a day. Former aid minister Rory Stewart has talked of visiting a £30,000 water scheme in which so much went into design, implementation and evaluation that only £1,500 ended up being spent on two toilets and some plastic buckets. Then there are multi-million-pound disasters such as PlayPumps, an infamous scheme backed by Western politicians and promoted by pop stars, in which African children would pump water by playing on a roundabout. It proved to be expensive, impractical, liable to break and reliant on either child labour or women forced to spend hours spinning on the carousel.

MrBeast’s stunt philanthropy is an online progression of the aid sector boom and concepts of celebrity saints that go back to 1984’s Band Aid. This initiative began as a pop star’s heartfelt reaction to scenes of starvation in Ethiopia but ended up helping a brutal Marxist dictatorship while turbo-charging a naïve idea that nice foreigners can solve complex issues of development by chucking in cash. So politicians wanting to look compassionate promoted neo-colonial aid policies that were at best farcical and at worst a costly fraud imposed on tax-payers. They were cheered on by a self-serving industry that swelled in size and power as it claimed to be saving the world while in reality help fuel conflict, foster corruption and corrode democracy — as seen most recently with aid’s toxic role in Afghanistan that assisted the return of the Taliban.

Many of these charities entered into a Faustian pact with celebrities. They used the fame of stars in the tussle for funds while in return providing a platform for actors, models and singers to pose as experts on charitable issues. For instance, Save the Children took some minor celebrities on trips to three continents to “better understand how breastfeeding is such a crucial lifesaver for babies in developing countries”. And these sorts of strategies paid off: former foreign secretary David Miliband pockets £1 million a year running the International Rescue Committee, which has recruited a stellar list of “ambassadors” and was handed at least £33 million from Britain last year.

The aid industry routinely demonstrates how naïve interventions can do more harm than good while raising questions over its real beneficiaries. Intriguingly, a leaked 36-page “braindump” guide written by Donaldson for his production staff and shared on social media sets out his insights, strategy and tips for hooking viewers. He says their aim is to make the best possible YouTube videos and explains the need for alluring titles. “I Spent 50 Hours In My Front Yard” is lame and you wouldn’t click it. But you would hypothetically click “I Spent 50 Hours In Ketchup”. He argues that it is far cheaper and funnier to offer a prize of five packs of Doritos a day instead of $20,000. Then one section asks “What is the goal of our content” before replying “the goal of our content is to excite me”. And the document concludes by stating his determination to build a company worth “10s of billions”. 

Such desires are the driving force of capitalism, an economic system that has lifted so many people from poverty, raised life expectancy and improved our world. Yet it can be a ruthless creed — and there are valid questions over the exploitative nature of MrBeast’s stunts that are such catnip for YouTube’s algorithms. He relies heavily on “poverty porn” — the depiction of suffering people to trigger pity in order to elicit donations — although such manipulative and parasitical tactics have been ditched by many leading charities amid anger at “white saviourism”. People with disabilities have also criticised his videos as “inspiration porn”, a term coined by the Australian activist Stella Young to describe their objectification for gratification of others. At the end of one video on cataract surgery, Donaldson makes a particularly degrading and asinine comment: “I wonder if we’ll get 1,000 more views from the people we cured LOL.”

This unlikely media tycoon says money is just “fuel to grow the business and help people and not much else”, pledging to give it all away while expanding his interests into food. Yet his model of philanthropy relies upon creating viral videos to build mass audiences for advertisers and brand partners. It is Comic Relief on steroids — another altruistic enterprise that used celebrities, crass stunts and pity to raise cash while reinforcing damaging stereotypes reminiscent of Band Aid’s idea of an Africa “where nothing ever grows”. The charity sparked fury when it sent four wealthy stars to live in a Kenyan slum for a week to show how life there could be tough.

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Donaldson and his team also insist they are educating viewers, showing solutions, inducing meaningful change and inspiring younger people to do good — familiar arguments heard from previous celebrity pushers of performative philanthropy. They claim, for instance, that building two wells in Cameroon inspired others to build another 299. But as seen, the issue is how many stay operational. There have been a string of scandals involving young Western idealists such as Renee Bach, who, aged 20 and with no training, set up a feeding and medical clinic to “save” children in Uganda — ultimately leading to the deaths of dozens of babies. Another example is Katie Meyler, hailed in the White House for her work empowering girls in Liberia that raised $8 million, even as some were being raped by her co-founder and lover, who had Aids when he died.

Donaldsons’s impressive success has led to a spate of similar stunt philanthropists turning staged acts of kindness into revenue-raising spectacles for viewers on YouTube and social media clicks. One influencer in India donated buffalos to a milkman whose business was struggling, while a popular content creator in Nigeria — one of several MrBeast imitators in a country with eye-watering poverty rates — showered cash on a couple of women market stallholders. Like so much of the aid industry, this is altruism dependent on the whims of the donors — and it is designed for entertainment and fund-raising rather than a sustained attempt to drive change.

It might seem strange to carp over a few good deeds filmed for YouTube clicks. After all, even if this Gen Z mode of philanthropy is brash and narcissistic, some lives are being changed for the better. Yet at the same time, Donaldson is exploiting less fortunate people’s problems to shape his image of decency, while reinforcing the aid illusion that has blown so much money and achieved so little over the past half century. And there is no doubt who is the biggest winner from the MrBeast brand of benevolence: the man who could become the world’s first YouTube billionaire. 

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