Why millennials hate MrBeast

Toward an account of bait

I wrote a reported essay on MrBeast, the brand alias of the YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson, in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine; you can read it online here, if you have a subscription. I’m also on the Hard Fork podcast talking about MrBeast with Kevin Roose and Casey Newton; you can listen here. Thank you to my editor, Willy Staley, who wrote most of the lines for which I’ve received compliments, and the piece’s fact-checker, Jane Ackermann, whom I hope will file a grievance for the amount of MrBeast she watched in the course of checking.

Donaldson, for those who don’t know, is now the biggest single YouTuber on the planet after overtaking the Swedish gamer Pewdiepie last year. His shtick, or at least the one he’s best known for,¹ is giving away hundreds of thousands of dollars--sometimes to charities, sometimes to winners of elaborate, Wonka-esque contests, and sometimes to people selected seemingly at random. The animating question of the essay is something like: “Is this guy for real?”

I find this is an increasingly common question posed in this newsletter. I finalized the MrBeast piece the same week I interviewed Henry De Tolla, the UMass Lowell lacrosse player/TikToker who went viral among 30somethings on Twitter for a series of uncannily enthusiastic “news” videos about the social media personality “Baby Gronk.” (Sample below.)

@h00pifyIs Livvy using Baby Gronk for clout? #livvy #babygronk #dripking #lsufootball #collegefootball #rizz #tattoo #highschoolfootball #football #youthfootball #livvydunne #calebhammett #thedripking #henrydetolla #h00pify #detolla #louisianastateuniversity

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Who is the new Drip King? A conversation with Henry De Tolla, a.k.a. H00pify

De Tolla’s videos went viral because they’re so deeply weird it’s hard for adult humans to assess whether or not he is earnestly attempting to report on the comings and goings of “Baby Gronk” and “the Drip King” or if he is doing “a bit.” In our interview De Tolla described his videos as “satire,” but as Rebecca Jennings points out he seems to be using the special Zoomer definition of “satire,” which means something like “I said something I didn’t really believe to provoke some kind of reaction on social media.” And indeed, De Tolla was open with me that he emphasizes some of the weirder, alienating, and funnier aspects of his delivery (like the fact that he never blinks) because of how viewers respond (i.e., negatively).

De Tolla’s videos are quite funny, but I think of satire as a kind of humor with a particular target, which I’m not sure the De Tolla videos have. From what I could tell his main goal was to build an audience (among middle schoolers, he says), not to undertake social criticism through the deployment of wit, or whatever. What Zoomers like to call “satire”--saying stuff you don’t really believe to provoke negative reactions on social media to expand your audience--I tend to call “bait.” I suppose you might say that bait can function as satire, but whatever social criticism it generates is an accident. The main point is to get people watching, sharing, and talking about your content.

For most of my life I have thought of people my age as adept users of the internet--sophisticated consumers of content, able to read varying levels intent and irony the way a tree scientist (?) looks at rings on a tree (???). But the rise of TikTok and Zoomer internet practice has forced me to revise this judgment--too often the kind of thing that seems to travel from TikTok to Twitter or to my group chats seems to be obvious bait that people in their 30s can no longer correctly assess.

MrBeast doesn’t create bait, precisely, but I think part of what makes him so alienating to people my age is that he has the same kind of calculating relationship to his work that De Tolla does, in which it can be hard to separate the actual content (so to speak) from whatever audience growth strategy is at work. The extent to which MrBeast happily complies with the unsettling prerogatives of YouTube audience growth in his filmed commission of philanthropy--or, at least, something that vaguely approaches philanthropy--can make him confounding to people over the age of, say, 30. Take, for example, the thumbnail to the video “1,000 Blind People See For the First Time,” which is (to me) deeply unnerving in a way that is difficult to square with the fact that Donaldson partnered with a vision charity and actually did pay for 1,000 cataract surgeries:

But the thing I found when reporting was that the tension between the “ickiness” of MrBeast’s audience-growth stratagems (like the thumbnail above) and the, I guess, genuineness of his generosity was much less troubling to the young people who make up that audience. In fact, my sense was that one reason they liked MrBeast was his relentless cynicism about YouTube, audience growth, and revenue, and even more, his willingness to include viewers in that cynicism, by, e.g., telling them how much money they’re making his channel (and therefore generating for charity) when they tune in:

For Miller, what makes Donaldson remarkable is that he essentially asks his audience to see themselves as a commodity, and to therefore see their views and likes and shares as a force for good: “MrBeast is actually telling people that they’re entering a marketplace, by saying, ‘If you watch this, this is worth so much money, I can raise this much money and I can spend it on good causes.’” As Donaldson says in one video for his philanthropic sub-channel: “Beast Philanthropy is literally funded by your eyeballs. Not even joking.” Watching MrBeast videos may not be “work” in the traditional sense, but insofar as there are no illusions between Donaldson and his viewer about the audience creating a commodity to be sold, it’s more complicated than the commonly understood passive experience of channel-surfing on TV.

For older viewers, maybe less accustomed to seeing themselves so bluntly as numbers on other people’s spreadsheets, the strategy of wedding philanthropy so closely with audience growth can seem, well, icky. But Donaldson’s young fans have mostly grown up on YouTube; some, like Jeremiah Howard, have been watching his videos since they were preadolescents. They’re intimately familiar with the platform’s business and revenue structures, both because so much content on YouTube is concerned with these topics but also because many of them are striving amateur YouTubers themselves. (When I asked Howard what he was going to do with the $50,000 check Donaldson gave him, he told me he was thinking about using it to kick-start his family’s YouTube channel, FLBOYRHINO.) For people in Howard’s position, adjacent to the internet’s vast new engines of wealth and commerce but able only to participate at the margins, MrBeast both imbues their role with a sense of purpose and offers a channel for redistribution that, as Howard learned, may not otherwise happen. To them, he looks not ethically compromised, but ingenious.

I don’t want to overstate the sophistication of adolescent YouTube consumers, and I’m not sure any of this yet amounts to a coherent theory. But I am interested in how unconcerned Zoomers seem to be with the relative sincerity or authenticity of their media figures, or maybe I should say I’m interested in how concerns over authenticity focus on other spheres than they might have for us.

Anyway, here’s the MrBeast piece. Enjoy!

1. He also does other kinds of strange, expensive, and elaborate stunts like hiring an assassin to hunt him, but it’s the giveaways that make MrBeast stand out and are a key component of why his fans like him.