I finally caught up with the seeming phenomenon of BEAST GAMES and its eponymous torquemada and Gen Alpha icon Jimmy Donaldson, aka “Mr. Beast”. Donaldson is ostensibly the King of YouTube, with his 350 million subscribers a testimony to the level of popularity and clout he wields. That’s slightly more than the entire current population of the United States. So when he decided to create his vision of a reality elimination series, it appears just about everything had to be on the same scale of largesse that comes with that territory. The number of contestants–2000 at the outset before half were eliminated in the teaser video that preceded the 10-episode series. The prizes–$5 million for the eventual winner, weekly competitions that offered up hundreds of thousands of dollars as consolations and brand new Lamborghinis and Teslas (with $100,000 in the trunk) as temptations. And naturally the budget–a reported $10 million an episode, putting it in roughly the same ballpark as a Taylor Sheridan scripted series. It’s not a surprise that this wound up on Prime Video as opposed to, say, Game Show Network.
I’ll freely concede I’m far from the demo that this is targeted for, though my experience in reading rooms strongly suggests that Mr. Beast’s outsized personality plays extremely well to his minions. That bravado and ‘tude is omnipresent in what I saw and his experience with viral video production helps to create an awful lot of WTF moments that hit many of the notes that have made reality competitions a staple of longform television for pretty much this entire century. But I suspect his audience is not necessarily old enough to remember, engage with or even acknowledge the likes of SURVIVOR, FEAR FACTOR and BIG BROTHER that laid the groundwork and template for the level of over-the-top cutthroat gameplay and mindf–king that is evident here. And not to sound too much like Seth Meyers’ pipe and ceramic dog-loving curmedgeon, but “back in my day”, those shows were far more groundbreaking and original than what Donaldson and company have put together.
If I really wanted to piss these whippersnappers off, I’d bring up even more examples of how many different shows of so many different eras I saw that somehow were recreated in this series. For one, there’s already been an elimination competition with roughly 1000 contestants–the ill-fated adaption of the Japanese hit ULTRA QUIZ that NBC excitedly thought could kick off their 1981-82 season. That featured more cerebral challenges and had the already passe Dan Rowan and Dick Martin as talent, with a mere $100,000 at stake, so the fact despite an awful lot of hype it was among the lowest-rated shows of an otherwise uneventful summer might not come as a surprise to you.
BEAST GAMES is doing much, much better, and the fact that Prime Video is a global platform plays into the performance that this kind of format is capable of, particularly in Asian countries where this genre historically has played even better than it has here. As Mr. Beast’s verified X feed crowed after its December premiere, it ranked number one not only in the U.S., but in “more than half the countries on Earth!”. I suppose being tops in Burkina Faso means something to someone somewhere.
But as the ever-detailed ENTERTAINMENT STRATEGY GUY pointed out in a detailed synopis of just how BEAST GAMES has actually performed that dropped to his subscribers yesterday, when one truly ventures into the belly of the Beast known as streaming “ratings”, the hype and the spin begins to erode even quicker than the number of competitors vying for his riches.
For starters, he provides context for Amazon’s self-indulgent summary that Donaldson clearly repurposed:
While Beast Games took 26 days to get to 50 million viewers, it took 16 days for Fallout to get to 65 million viewers, and a mere three days for Red One to get to 50 million viewers. These all lag behind the Lord of the Rings TV series, The Rings of Power, which reached 25 million viewers in its first day and 100 million in its first three months. The second season reached 40 million viewers in the first 11 days…Amazon—like most streamers—doesn’t release that many new shows each week, so a new show almost by default should debut at number one around the world.
And as these meticulously niggly charts underscore, even within the walled gardens of both platform and genre, it’s, as ESG tacitly concluded, “meh”.
Oh yeah, there’s also that little barnacle of a lawsuit being filed by five of those contestants that tainted the show even before it began to be judged by folks with devices.
All this for a mere $100 million, plus marketing costs.
So even for a platform as deeply pocketed as Prime Video, it’s not yet a lock for a second season. But that may not ultimately matter to someone like Donaldson, because as Alexx Altman-Devilbiss of The National News Desk reported late last week he may very well have another outlet already lined up:
YouTube star MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, is reportedly interested in buying TikTok after it was temporarily banned for a few hours in the United States.
Donaldson first showed interest in the platform in a Jan. 13 post on X saying he’d “buy TikTok so it doesn’t get banned.” The next day, Donaldson added, “Unironically I’ve had so many billionaires reach out to me since I tweeted this, let’s see if we can pull this off.” Recently, Donaldson was mentioned in reports related to an investor group looking to buy TikTok’s U.S. operations in an all-cash offer. Recruiter.com Ventures founder and CEO Jesse Tinsley shared on Monday that MrBeast is part of the effort. “We’ve assembled an incredible team of investors led by me including MrBeast Employerdotcom among many of the great institutions and families in the United States and have officially submitted a compelling all-cash offer to ByteDance to keep TikTok in the U.S.,” Tisnsley (sic) wrote on X.
And that might ultimately be a venue that would treat something akin to BEAST GAMES more favorably than ESG’s analysis does. The hard truth, as he concluded in his piece, is that how success is defined in shortform video is a lot different than even how “mainstreamers” do, and the performance gap of at least one of TikTok’s current stars is even more striking that what has been revealed about Mr. Beast translated to a business where stickiness and regular viewing matter far more than ubiquitously available episodic comedy:
(A)ccording to Nielsen, about 6 million people watched his show per week. Since Amazon told us the viewers are roughly 50/50 US to global, that means maybe 10 to 12 million regular viewers per week. If we take YouTube’s numbers at face value—and I don’t! Nor should you! Read here!—then about say 12 million folks watching per week, then about 2-7% of Donaldson’s audience is tuning in, and that assumes that nearly 100% of Beast Games’ audience watched his YouTube channel. (Not to mention, to get to that 7% number I assumed half his followers are fake…)That’s a low conversion rate for presumably one of the biggest influencers going!
On TikTok, again it’s even worse. Previously, one of the biggest flops on streaming was The D’Amelio Show on Hulu, a TikTok creator who is one of the biggest stars on TikTok, but not influential enough to get her hundreds of millions of fans to actually, you know, watch her show. Allegedly, Charli D’Amelio has 159 million followers on TikTok and 11.8 billion likes, but no one watched her Hulu show. Actually, while we’re at it, Mr. Beast has 119 million TikTok followers. Again they didn’t watch.),
So I suppose for someone who is actually capable of seriously discussing purchasing a company with a reported price tag of $170 billion, what folks like ESG or even moi dig up on him is wholly immaterial and disposable. Kinda like how I feel about this show.
Until next time…