How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

This resonates. Movies lack depth nowadays, especially cultural depth.

They do sometimes convey interesting messages and they are well produced and captivating but they lack soul. I think about films like "Forest Gump". Personally, I really liked the film, maybe other people didn't like it as much but I found it to be unique and culturally enriching. I'm not even American but I could relate. Modern "movies" usually don't have enough character development; or if they do, it's highly generic. Any character development in modern movies is focused on making the character relatable to the most common denominator among the masses so they lack individuality.

It's even telling that we have separate words "film" and "movies". It reminds me of the book "Brave New World" which is set in the future; they have something called "Feelies" which is described as a complete visual and sensory experience but they don't teach you anything; they are all focused on very narrow physical experiences. Everything in BNW is designed in a way to reduce people's awareness and reduce diversity of thought to the point that they never think to ask certain questions.

They also run illegal lotteries targeting children and fake the majority of their videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5xf40KrK3I

One of the key details missing from the analysis being done in this thread is that Jimmy was iterating and figuring out how to optimize every part of his content for years before he really blew up in popularity. Having a loop where you keep publishing content and analyzing all aspects of it is the ultimate key to success, given enough time and resources.

As I understand it, MrBeast helped fund the creation of ViewStats [0] in order to gather more data on thumbnails and channel / video performance over time. Then this knowledge is applied to their own content in order to make it even more successful. At this point there's probably multiple people who specialize just in thumbnail optimization.

Another key detail about MrBeast production is that they target a global audience, so they hire famous voice actors of every major language to do their voice-overs. A few years before YouTube supported multiple audio tracks, they had different channels for various languages and regions. Now it's just a drop-down in the video settings. Many products fail to take internationalization and localization seriously, so their products are unable to penetrate non-western markets.

Speaking of international reach, I saw in an interview a few years back that MrBeast was trying to expand to the Chinese market, but none of his public interviews since then have discussed how he's doing there. This goes a bit against the extreme focus on YouTube as his primary platform. A quick search on bilibili (which I believe is the Chinese equivalent of YouTube), shows his latest video hitting 1.6 million views and 8k comments, which isn't bad but it doesn't really compare to the amount of attention that he gets on YouTube. It seems like even the most skilled content creators in the West still struggle to break into the Chinese market.

[0] https://www.viewstats.com/

>is obvious until you realize it means, for example, allowing idle time on incredibly expensive machines to favor responsiveness, which just seems wasteful.

Weird how things that seem to make sense in one context seem to make no sense in another context. If you told me a factory runs their widget making machine at 70% capacity in case someone comes along with an order for a different widget or twice as many widgets, at first glance think that's a bad idea. If your customers can keep your widget machine 100% full, using only part of the machine for the chance that something new will come along seems wasteful. And through cultural osmosis the idea of not letting your hardware sit idle is exactly the sort of thing that feels right.

And yet, we do this all the time in IT. If you instead of a widget machine told me that you run your web server at 100% capacity all the time, I'd tell you that's also a terrible idea. If you're running at 100% capacity and have no spare headroom, you can't serve more users if one of them sends more requests than normal. Even though intuitively we know that a machine sitting idle is a "waste" of compute power, we also know that we need capacity in reserve because demand isn't constant. No one sizes (or should size) their servers for 100% utilization. Even when you have something like a container cluster, you don't target your containers to 100% utilization, if for no other reason than you need headroom while the extra containers spin up. Odd that without thinking that through, I wouldn't have applied the same idea to manufacturing machinery.

Having been a young kid in the 80s, what I recently discovered was the primary concern with parents at the time (because, I genuinely don’t remember) was using those afternoon and Saturday morning cartoons as a vehicle to sell products to kids - a barrage of advertisements. Seems pale in comparison to extreme behavior that potentially endangers others, e.g. deliberately crashing your airplane for views/hits.