The most subscribed individual on YouTube
(And how the "individual" can be misleading)
The year is 2018. With more people in India gaining access to the Internet every day, the YouTube channel of T-Series, an Indian record label, is projected to surpass the long-standing PewDiePie in subscribers. Felix Kjellberg, the creator behind the latter channel, notices what is happening and releases a semi-serious diss track against them. While support for PewDiePie generally came as a protest against YouTube’s growing preference for corporations over individual creators, something Felix himself acknowledged, The YouTube war that ensues is a problematic one. White supremacists like the Christchurch and Poway terrorists reference it when they murder people practicing their religion, and the diss track’s stereotypical generalization of T-Series as India becomes a hotbed for anti-Indian sentiment. Horrified by the damage and surpassed in subscribers, Felix calls for the war to end in 2019. In adherence to the original intentions of the war, people continue to call him the most subscribed individual YouTuber with the justification that as a faceless corporation, T-Series cannot be considered for that title.
The year is now 2023. Felix has more or less retired, making videos about his new life in Japan and expecting to become a father. He plateaus at a staggering 111 million subscribers but seemingly loses the title of most subscribed individual to Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson, a dedicated PewDiePie supporter during the war with T-Series. At first glance, this seems like a cause for celebration. If a less problematic, new-generation YouTuber is surpassing an old legend, how could there be a problem? While MrBeast has nowhere near the subscribers of T-Series, doesn’t Jimmy’s meteoric rise strengthen the belief that individuals can still compete with corporations? To me, the answer to this question is a no. While MrBeast is certainly more individual than the likes of T-Series, the idea that Jimmy is an individual YouTuber is challenged by the significant division of labor required by his channels and the position MrBeast has as a brand.
People at work
As liberating as it may feel to be a YouTuber instead of an office worker, there is still an unavoidable amount of labor involved in the process. Pre-production, production, and post-production are the steps involved in creating most videos, with the second being necessary for there to be a video in the first place. If your projects are relatively small, like videos from a gaming YouTuber or vlogger, these steps can be undertaken by you alone or alongside an editor to ease the workload. Even if you hire an editor, you would still be doing around half the work for your channel and likely remain the vast majority of appeal to your audience. However, this changes as projects scale up. As the face behind a channel with over 100 million subscribers and highly expensive content, Jimmy has no choice but to hire a wealth of other people. Managers are required to rent out buildings for MrBeast videos. More managers are required to take care of his other social media accounts on YouTube and beyond, some being reupload channels that translate his videos to common languages like Spanish. As videos get more ambitious and footage-heavy, more editors are required to release a quality video at its proposed time. Jimmy is far from an individual YouTuber in terms of people involved, but he is accepted as one because of the invisibility of labor—huge cash giveaways and stunts from the MrBeast crew are exciting while phone calls and Adobe Premiere are not.
On May 6, 2023, Jimmy released a MrBeast video where he funds hearing aids for 1,000 people around the world. If you scroll through the top comments, there is plenty of praise for Jimmy and significantly less for the medical professionals handling the hearing aids. Prior to the release, he posted on Twitter that nearly 4,000 hours of editing went into it. As of May 2023, not a single editor is mentioned in the description of the video.
Face meets brand
With how many people are working to keep Jimmy’s projects running, it should be clear now that MrBeast is a company that is smaller but just as established as T-Series, complete with job applications and a LinkedIn page. Since there is more to the corporate structure than Jimmy and a few channel managers, painting him as an individual YouTuber abstracts many people out of the MrBeast brand.
In fairness to Jimmy, he does restore some of the individuality behind MrBeast by making himself its representative. It is difficult to picture a face behind a company, but MrBeast is personified by Jimmy’s presence in every video. Even if people choose not to watch, they can see him with his mouth agape on half the thumbnails and correctly assume his importance to each channel. However, the consistent use of Jimmy’s face in these instances is not as much for asserting his individuality than it is for branding. People watch videos for stimulation. An excited face on a thumbnail draws people in by hinting at some spectacle. Jimmy’s face really only enters the equation to ensure people know it is a MrBeast video, avoiding conflation with smaller channels that lack the resources to do the gimmick justice. These near-identical faces portray Jimmy not as a nuanced human being, but as a PNG file. His unmistakable thumbnail face is pasted in solely to succeed at the YouTube algorithm and has been caricatured to death through memes of his rap battle counterpart.
My goal is not to completely discredit Jimmy. Given his massive audience and appearances on other outlets, there are certainly millions who watch him for what he personally brings to the table. However, I think it is safe to assume that people largely watch MrBeast for MrBeast, not for Jimmy. Elaborate games with half a million dollars in prize money take multiple teams of people to set up, and Jimmy is only one contributor out of many. Jimmy has friends—Chris, Chandler, Karl, and others provide their own entertaining moments to make a MrBeast video complete. If people are not watching for Jimmy specifically, they must be interested in the content he happens to be interested in producing. If his contribution is not the majority even then, it becomes harder to see him as an individual YouTuber rather than the representative of a larger YouTube project.
While MrBeast was undoubtedly the product of an individual YouTuber in the past, the incredible scale of its operations now provides reasons to doubt. As MrBeast, Jimmy is the king of Anglophone YouTube, releasing projects that no person and caffeine intake could accomplish alone. He has ventured into the food industry through MrBeast Burger and Feastables. He has appeared in a Super Bowl commercial and genuinely had the option to purchase his own. With so many people loving MrBeast and touting it as number one, I hope they realize there is much more to its story than Jimmy and his YouTube account.
The individual creator(s)
Given my somewhat pessimistic commentary about MrBeast, it makes sense now to question what or who I would consider to be an individual creator. I frankly haven’t given such a definition much thought, but going off what I have mentioned here, I would say the following two are hallmarks of an individual creator:
Content is largely produced by the creator themselves
Audience either watches for the creator as a person or the quality content they produce through their own labor
These obviously do not account for YouTube-based groups and may make little sense in some case I don’t know of, but I think it is reasonable to expect YouTubers to contribute the most to their own channel. On a more optimistic note, there are three successful creators in particular that I want to commend for their individuality—I will discuss each of them below.
bill wurtz
Bill Wurtz is a personal hero of mine in that he released his wildly successful “history of the entire world, i guess” a day before I took the AP World History exam. Even with that bias aside, his channel is a strong and entertaining portfolio of his own work. Creating music videos and skits with the rare documentary in between, Bill produces his own animations and music, sometimes recording his physical self as he sings through abstract arrangements of colored objects. Knowing he has now added 3D animation to his already diverse skillset, I have nothing but respect for his work.
Bill is a strongly individual creator. While his in-person appearances on his channel are infrequent, his voice is omnipresent. People watch not only for the music videos he makes by himself, but for his own modest personality—he regularly receives and answers fan questions on his website.
Primitive Technology
Run by a man named John Plant, Primitive Technology is a channel that my eighth-grade art teacher showed to the class—I have been a viewer ever since that day. The name of the channel is self-explanatory. After conducting some research, John takes himself to the Australian wilderness with a camera and with the power of manual labor, produces primitive technologies using his natural surroundings. He remains silent over the course of every video to emphasize his own work (though he does provide subtitles as YouTube captions system for context), creating a thoughtful and calm viewing experience. John has garnered over 10 million subscribers without saying a word, and I believe he rightfully earned them.
Unlike Bill Wurtz, I highly doubt people are watching Primitive Technology for John Plant. I am near-certain they are watching for the namesake of the channel, primitive technology. However, since John is doing all the work in its fascinating production process, I cannot consider him anything other than a top-tier individual creator.
kiwami japan
I cannot remember when I stumbled across Kiwami Japan (or the Japanese Knife Man, as he mentions on his Twitter profile), but the day I watched him create, use, and eat a knife made out of pasta was a life-changing moment. Kiwami Japan brands himself as a material science channel. He repurposes materials into completely unconventional versions of knives and other objects, all while maintaining a sense of humor I can best describe as a subdued HowToBasic. Although it has been a while since I last watched his videos, I can still remember watching in amazement and slight terror as he manifested a cucumber into existence before slicing it with a knife that should not have existed.
In terms of individuality, I think Kiwami Japan has commonalities with both Bill Wurtz and John Plant. While videos tend to be silent like Primitive Technology videos are, their comedic value makes Kiwami Japan himself a character of interest. Regardless of where he lands, I respect him immensely for producing his work independently.
I want to conclude this section with possibly the funniest YouTube comment I have ever read, which happens to be a self-pinned comment I just saw under his chocolate kitchen knife video:
Everyone creates
Going back to the idea of defining an individual creator and labeling people based on that, I think there is definitely an issue with subjectivity. If you want to get technical, no creator can truly be individual since the tools people use for content creation are made by other people. Renting a building for a MrBeast video requires construction workers to have made it in the first place. Other people had to produce the cucumbers and whetstones necessary for a Kiwami Japan video. Even in a bare-bones Primitive Technology video, someone had to build the camera. Nobody is without the labor of others, so if we care about individuality, we just have to draw our own lines on the issue and try our best to work independently. Perhaps it would be helpful to drop the adjective as a whole and call each person a creator.
I’m not sure what else to add, but I hope that YouTube will one day reclaim its old “broadcast yourself” motto for the creators that make a living off it. Channels that can fill cities worth of people can start with a single person, and I would hate to see their vision compromised by giving agency to strangers or the algorithm. In cases where a company is what a creator truly wants, I hope everyone within it feels accepted as a creator or contributor.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for creating if you like doing that. I personally had some fun layering those MrBeast thumbnails over each other.