Shaan and Sam break down the economics of MrBeast’s Beast Games — the Squid Game recreation that hit 132 million views in its first week. They estimate his ad revenue, sponsorship deal with Brawl Stars, and 10 million new subscribers, then zoom out to the broader principle: epic, ambitious projects attract disproportionate talent, sponsorship, and audience relative to the effort required.
Speakers: Shaan Puri (host), Sam Parr (host)
MrBeast’s Beast Games: The Numbers [00:00:00]
Shaan: So just some numbers — the video got about 130 million views in seven days, which is crazy. I believe — Ben, you can fact-check me on this — I believe 130 million views is more than what the actual Squid Game got on Netflix. Now, Netflix is a paid service, and people watched multiple episodes, 12 hours of footage. But it’s still amazing — the fact that it’s comparable. The fact that somebody just watched the show and was like, “Oh yeah, we’ll do a backyard version of that,” and got 130 million people to watch, is insane.
Sam: So he spent three and a half million on it, just to put this in perspective. That’s basically half the cost of a 30-second Super Bowl commercial.
Shaan: Wow, really?
Sam: And it was fully paid for — I believe fully paid for by Brawl Stars, the super popular mobile game. So if you look at the arena where it was hosted, it’s a giant Brawl Stars arena. They had a huge logo in every shot. For Brawl Stars, this was such a smart move — they basically paid half the cost of a Super Bowl ad and got more viewership. Because you get 130 million people, the video is 27 minutes long versus a 30-second clip. And this is an epic thing that’s going to get shared, and then they can take this content and repurpose it for ads or anything else they want after the fact. Really smart. For Brawl Stars, three million dollars is probably one day of ad spend on Facebook or something. And Brawl Stars is owned by Supercell, which is like the biggest gaming company.
Estimating MrBeast’s Total Take [00:02:00]
Shaan: So if I’m MrBeast, I think he would have gotten Supercell to pay for the whole thing — three and a half million dollars. And I bet he also would have gotten another like five hundred thousand on top, just like a vague bonus on top. And then he probably would have said, “I’m going to keep YouTube ads on this, right, and I get all of it.”
So if MrBeast is getting 130 million views in the first seven days, and you do maybe four dollars per CPM, that’s around half a million dollars in the first week. But I believe his deal is going to be a lot better than four dollars CPM, because he’s one of the faces of YouTube. These guys have custom-negotiated deals, and I would bet a lot of money that it’s better than the standard four to five dollars.
Sam: What do you think it is?
Shaan: I bet he’s getting closer to ten dollars CPM. So if it’s ten, that’s 1.3 million dollars.
Sam: Just in a week.
Shaan: Just in a week. Plus, according to our notes, he got 10 million new subscribers in the first week. A normal week is 400,000 subscribers. So he’s 20x-ing his subscriber growth.
Epic Projects and Disproportionate Returns [00:04:30]
Shaan: So what does this do? He continues to be the content leader, he gets 10 million new subscribers — and those people are going to get notified for his next video — he makes a million dollars on ads, he gets the whole thing paid for by a sponsor.
And this is a great example of something we’ve talked about before. We talked about this with Elon — when Elon does epic stuff like “I’m going to go to Mars.” We talked about it with, I forget the guy’s name — Mark Lazari, or whoever it is that’s building that epic train system in America. I ranted about Disneyland last week. Because again, when you shoot for these epic projects, things that get people inspired and excited — it seems like it’s harder to pull off, but in many ways it’s easier.
You get talent to pour in because they want to be a part of something bold. You get sponsors to pour in because they want to bet on this epic thing that’s going to happen — they know it’s going to get visibility. You get your own motivation to get out of bed every day because you’re working on something so grand. Everybody does their best work, and people tune in to watch.
Sam: Ben just looked it up — 142 million people watched Squid Game on Netflix. 132 million watched Beast Games on YouTube. About the same, one to one.
Shaan: So you get disproportionate prizes when you go fish in a part of the pond that nobody else is fishing, because everyone else thinks the water is too deep and it’s too scary over there. The rewards are disproportionate — even to the effort and the work that goes in.