🎥 Mr. Beast is Wrong About YouTube

I was listening to a podcast from Alex Hormozi and he was talking about the idea that to get good at something you have to do it a lot (something that everyone knows intuitively but often forgets)

And it made me think of advice from Mr. Beast and some of these other "YouTube Analytics Channels" about how often you should upload YouTube videos and how you don't have to upload weekly

Background

I started my YouTube channel about 2 years ago during the pandemic and since then the channel has grown to over 100 videos, 5,000 subscribers, and has made about $10,000 (about half of which has come from YouTube ads)

The first video I uploaded to YouTube was the third video I had ever filmed with a proper camera

It was the second time I had ever exported footage from video editing software

It was the first time I had used an external microphone (it wasn't turned and the audio came from the lower quality built-in camera mic)

The video took me thirty minutes to write and thirty minutes to film

That video was really bad and was viewed only 100 times in the first 300 days it was live

At the time, I was so new that everything I produced was bad - there was no chance I would make something good.

To get better, I adopted the system of uploading new videos weekly.

After doing that for 2 years, the videos are much better (but still have a long way to go)

With such a small channel, how could I possibly know something that Mr. Beast doesn't?

Mr. Beast's Advice

Mr. Beast is basically Mr. Youtube - he's on his way to becoming the most subscribed YouTuber of all time and he's already one of the most watched channels of all time

For an example of scale, Mr. Beast's Squid Game parody has gotten more views than the original Squid Game show on Netflix

Mr Beast has done a ton of media in the last few years and gives out his advice for YouTubers who are trying to go viral and his advice is regarded as the best in the business given his track record

A common piece of advice he gives that all the youtube algorithm youtube channels have parroted is that you don't need to upload weekly

The reasoning behind this is simple:

"It's much easier to get 5 million views on one video than 50 thousand views on 100 videos."

While that advice might be excellent for established creators, when you're just starting out uploading weekly (or on some other very consistent schedule) is much more important

And since my opinion means basically nothing - let's look at what Mr Beast himself did in the first years of his youtube channel

Why Mr. Beast is Wrong

Luckily most of Mr Beast's early videos are still up on youtube so we can do some research into what went on

In this video Mr. Beast hit 50,000 channel views. This was after about a year of posting to the channel and after making about 65 videos (average of 700 views per video)

65 videos a year is a little more than a video a week over that first year

Using the wayback machine, we can go back in time and check out Mr Beast's SocialBlade analytics

The furthest back entry is from May 2015 (about 2 years after the 50,000 views video) and Mr Beast's channel now has 265 videos uploaded (200 more videos - about 2 videos per week) and 355,588 videos views (300,000 more views) for an average of 1,341 views per video

If you fast forward to today, 7 years later, Mr Beast has made 731 main channel videos (almost 500 more videos about 1.3 videos per week) and has over 18 billion views for an average of almost 25 million views per video

If you're Mr Beast in 2022 you definitely don't have to upload weekly, and going for big 10x 100x 1000x videos (or whatever thing it is that you're producing) is great once you've mastered the game

But if you're Mr Beast 10 years ago, or you're me today, or you're anyone trying to get started doing anything new - you need to get the reps in.

You need to get the bad work out and then improve and do it again

And then do that so much that it would be unreasonable for you to still be bad at whatever it is you're doing