I have a confession:
For most of my career, most of the content I created was — mostly — ignored.
Sure, I’ve made a few social media posts that approached a thousand likes. I’ve authored a handful of articles that were published in places like WIRED and Forbes. And I’ve written countless reports that attribute leads and revenue to my blog posts and case studies.
But the truth is, I’m skeptical that conventional content marketing is worth the investment of time and money, based on my own experience.
And I’m not alone. Because, like it or not, most content marketing sucks.
It’s safe. It’s boring. And, worst of all, it’s just advertising in disguise.
In defense of all the content marketers who are currently yelling at me through the screen, the vast majority of us are wearing handcuffs. Our companies put both explicit and implicit constraints on what kinds of content we can create, what topics to cover, how it should look, and how to measure success.
In a world with infinite content to choose from, we shouldn’t be surprised that average content gets ignored and forgotten. This fate is even less surprising for marketing content, which is not only forgettable but also — almost always — a trick to sell you something.
And then, there’s MrBeast.
The King of Content
Personally, I’m not the biggest fan of MrBeast’s videos. But I’m a massive fan of his strategy.
MrBeast — real name Jimmy Donaldson — is the most successful YouTube creator of all time. His videos have amassed 75 billion views. Put another way, that’s nearly 10 views per human on the planet. His primary YouTube channel alone boasts more than 370 million subscribers, without including his popular accounts on other platforms.
He’s the king.
You might now be screaming at me, “MrBeast is a content creator, not a content marketer!” Perhaps this was true when he started his channel — at 13 years old, I might add. Today, however, MrBeast controls a vast business empire, ranging from a production company to a chocolate brand to endorsement deals. He directly promotes his products in his videos, where he reaches a loyal audience that often exceeds the viewership of the Super Bowl.
Professional marketers promote their company’s products, too, of course, in the form of lifeless blog posts that I’ve seen get as little as three views. Not three hundred million views. Three. We’re talking about a galaxy-sized gap in reach, engagement, and, at the end of the day, money.
Maybe this gap explains why executives undervalue the exponential impact of truly exceptional content.
Meanwhile, a young man named Jimmy built a content marketing machine so lucrative that he refused to sell it for a billion dollars. Now, three years later, he’s raising capital at a valuation of five billion dollars. It’s hard to fathom the records this man might shatter, when fueled by the funding of a corporate giant.
So here’s the question:
What does Jimmy get right about content, that corporate giants get wrong?
I believe there are three reasons why MrBeast wins (one for every person who reads this):
MrBeast works backwards from what his audience wants
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told to “create a hype video for X product launch,” “publish a case study about Y benefit,” or “make a social post that destroys Z competitor.” For lots of content marketers, these are simply the sounds of a normal workday.
But there’s a fatal flaw with all of the above demands: They start with what our company wants — not what our audience wants. This might strike you as a reasonable approach, until you consider that no other kind of content is so inwardly-focused and self-serving.
Imagine going to the movies with your date, expecting to see the big summer blockbuster. Instead, you’re both forced to watch a feature-length autobiography by the film’s director, who explains why she’s the top talent in Hollywood, why her specific strengths make her the clear industry leader, and why she’s the only director who can fulfill our cinematic needs.
That would be a bad movie. Yet that mindset is the status quo of content marketing.
To pre-empt more potential screams: I’ll admit that there is indeed a time and place for content that promotes your genius product, while criticizing your stupid competitors. Crucially, though, that time and place is rarely your first encounter with someone who’s never heard of your company before.
“I’m the BEST! Try me NOW! See me in ACTION! Also, hello, it’s nice to meet you.”
Back to MrBeast. Exactly zero of MrBeast’s videos are about Feastables, his chocolate brand, or any of his other businesses for that matter. Here are his last five video titles:
Last to Leave Their Circle Wins $500,000
I Spent 100 Hours Inside the Pyramids
Every Minute One Person Is Eliminated
I Helped 2,000 People Walk Again
2,000 People Fight for $5,000,000
Side note: It’s no accident that all of these titles include numbers, use simple syntax, and are a similar length. More on that later.
What’s all-important here is that MrBeast doesn’t start with an ulterior motive — like selling a specific product — and then reverse engineer a video to sneakily accomplish that motive. Instead, he spends his life obsessing over a single goal:
Give the audience what they want.
“All I do is wake up every day and obsess over how to make the best videos possible. It's all I care about.”
Of course, MrBeast has a critical advantage over corporate content marketers like us. Because for him — at least to a large extent — the real product he’s selling is the video. MrBeast makes ad revenue when his videos perform well, whereas the benefit of high-performing, awareness-level marketing content is less tangible and less immediate.
But despite this difference, the fact is that you, me, and MrBeast are playing the same game. We’re all publishing content in an endless battle for our audience’s eyeballs. We’re all competing with each other in metrics like click-through rate. And we’re all prisoners to AI algorithms that eat these metrics to expel their recommendations.
We’re all players in the great attention game. But only a fraction of the players act like it.
MrBeast is a scientist when searching for the perfect hook
I’m willing to bet my life savings that, if you’re in marketing, you’ve seen a graphic like this:
Yes, I’m enough of a nerd that I created the graphic just for this blog — using a fake company. But I was able to do so in 10 minutes, since it’s more or less identical to the real webinar promos that flood my LinkedIn feed. Go google images for “supply chain webinar” if you don’t believe me (most are somehow even more boring than mine).
Now compare that graphic to this representative MrBeast thumbnail, from a 2023 video called “$1 vs $1,000,000,000 Yacht!”
I won’t ask which image would win head-to-head. We know the answer to that question, because so far, 439 million people have watched the yacht video, including yours truly. Unless my fake graphic would have produced the most popular webinar in human history, by several orders of magnitude, MrBeast has me beat again.
I shouldn’t feel too bad. After all, MrBeast is, in my opinion, the world’s preeminent expert on finding the perfect “hook.”
The hook is the preview information that you use to decide — in a matter of milliseconds — whether to engage with a piece of content or keep scrolling. Hooks take different forms on different platforms: It’s title–thumbnail combo on YouTube, it’s the first three lines of the caption on LinkedIn, it’s the headline of an article on Google, and so on. The worst examples of hooks are condemned as clickbait. The best examples shape our civilization.
Show me any viral content, on any platform, and I will show you a powerful hook. MrBeast is so supernaturally gifted at this skill that other creators with millions of subscribers still consult him for advice.
However, MrBeast wasn’t born a master of hookcraft. It took him more than one hundred mediocre videos to figure out the formula, as he himself is quick to admit: “When I was a smaller channel, the videos I was making sucked.”
Another side note: Wouldn’t it be nice as an employee to get a hundred attempts before your first big success? You might just reward the company’s patience.
Beyond patient practice, I’d argue there are two key lessons to learn from MrBeast’s hooks. First, his approach is rooted in real-time data. In fact, that yacht thumbnail was not the original image he posted alongside the video. I remember seeing the original version on my YouTube feed:
Like all elite YouTubers, MrBeast and his team closely monitor the performance of his videos right after posting them — experimenting with alternate titles and thumbnails that are prepared and tested in advance. He knows that improving a video’s click-through rate by just 1 or 2% can double its view count, since the YouTube algorithm promotes it to more people.
After almost 900 videos’ worth of experimentation, MrBeast should have a strong intuition for the right hook. As Malcolm Gladwell points out, intuition is not magic; it’s experience. Casual observers might criticize MrBeast for content that looks predictable and repetitive. Careful observers will recognize that his formulaic title structure and familiar thumbnail style are the signs of mastery.
As content marketers, we can only climb this essential learning curve when we’re given the freedom to follow the data, wherever it leads. Once again, the constraints of convention hold us back here. When we’re compelled to follow brand guidelines, approved messaging, compliance standards, and our superiors’ personal preferences, we’ve already lost the game.
There’s an even more fundamental lesson for us to learn, if we want to create hooks like MrBeast. Because no matter how good we get at writing titles and designing thumbnails, the hook is still limited by the relevance of the content itself.
That is where MrBeast stands alone…
MrBeast combines mass appeal with unique expertise
The obvious problem with comparing marketers to MrBeast is that he’s able to make content about anything. No doubt, some of you have been shouting this point at me the whole time.
Trust me, I get it. I’ve spent my career marketing cybersecurity software, enterprise chatbots, and dental technology. MrBeast, meanwhile, has been handing out millions of dollars, eating the world’s largest slice of pizza, and burying himself alive.
Yet this is the counterintuitive reality of content creation: It often requires mass appeal to reach a niche audience.
MrBeast is the champion of mass appeal. Similar to the logic of primetime TV shows, MrBeast’s strategy is to make his videos relevant to as wide an audience as possible, rather than ultra relevant to a specific group. When he made 100 people — ages 1 through 100 — fight for half a million dollars, his target demographic was every age group. It was everyone.
YouTube is home to several billion videos, meaning that the homepage contains only the tip of the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg. Most of the videos that make it to this towering summit are extreme outliers in terms of their click-through rate, watch time, like-to-dislike ratio, and similar metrics. Conversely, a video that is only relevant to left-handed Canadian lumberjacks is judged to be a poor performer and sent by the algorithm to online oblivion, unlikely to ever reach those unfortunate lumberjacks.
The same general concept holds true for just about every platform.
Of course, MrBeast’s secret sauce isn’t just mass appeal — that’s the easy part. What sets his videos apart is that they are both relevant to everyone and reliant on his unique strengths. Looking through his last 50 or so videos, I’ve identified just four themes that they all share:
Giving away large sums of money or specific items
Comparing cheap and expensive experiences
Pushing himself to his mental and physical limits
Breaking records related to size or scale
MrBeast has spoken extensively about his passion for these activities, and over time, that passion has developed into deep expertise. Not many creators, for example, would be able to handle the daunting logistical and legal hurdles of hosting million-dollar competitions, which lock contestants in isolated environments, while capturing every angle on camera.
In essence, MrBeast has figured out the most universally popular ways to utilize his personal knowledge and interests. And our companies should be doing exactly the same thing.
Let’s return to my awful webinar idea about the “optimized modern supply chain.” And now let’s ask ourselves, as the leaders of this fake company, “What is the most universally popular way to utilize our unique expertise in modern supply chains?”
Maybe we film our CEO being carried by a drone — which “delivers” her like it will deliver all our packages in the near future?
Maybe we capture the entire journey of a toy, from factory to container ship to your door, to capture the incredible coordination along the way?
The ideas are infinite. But the concept is the same: Start with our area of expertise, but make it relevant to everyone, without trying to sell your products.
The right people will find you. You’ll make not just customers but fans. And your knowledge will speak for itself.
“Awesome”
Let’s be honest: Marketing doesn’t have a great reputation. When I think about marketing, the first words that come to mind are “annoying,” “manipulative,” “sleazy,” and “Don Draper,” not “heroic” or “essential.” I don’t think I’m alone here, either.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Content marketers, in particular, can rewrite the script — by creating videos and resources and experiences and communities that genuinely matter. To use my least favorite marketing cliché, it’s a win–win, for companies and for consumers.
MrBeast may be the best. But it’s no longer by much. An army of individual content creators, and a small but growing group of companies, have succeeded by putting the audience first.
We seek out content every day, while we avoid ads at every turn. Why not focus on the one we know our fellow homo sapiens enjoy?
Here’s what marketing could be:
Making awesome content. Not the dead-inside “awesome” that we comment on Slack when we publish another product datasheet. I mean awe-inspiring awesome.
Winning the attention game. In a climate that treats experimentation and failure as a prerequisite to any meaningful breakthrough.
Adding value to the world. Our teams have important inventions and ideas that we — now more than ever — are able to share on a global scale.
In the words of MrBeast: “I like helping people. It makes me happy.”
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