Benzinga - by Chris Katje, Benzinga Staff Writer.
Content creator Jimmy Donaldson (aka MrBeast) is among the most well-known social media figures thanks to his large following on YouTube, where he has over 200 million subscribers.
In the ever-evolving world of social media and sources of revenue for content creators, MrBeast recently conducted an experiment.
What Happened: MrBeast recently uploaded his first video to X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. The video was an old one from the content creator that featured vehicles of different price points in his well-known $1 vs. $100,000,000 series.
The video was originally uploaded to YouTube, the video platform owned by Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG)(NASDAQ:GOOGL).
"$1 Car vs $100,000,000 Car!!! I'm curious how much ad revenue a video on X would make so I'm reuploading this to test it. Will share ad rev next week," MrBeast tweeted.
On Monday, MrBeast reported the results of the video.
"My first X video made over $250,000! But it's a bit of a façade. Advertisers saw the attention it was getting and bought ads on my video (I think) and thus my revenue per view is prob higher than what you'd experience."
A screenshot shared by MrBeast reveals the tweet had 156,685,975 impressions and earned $263,665 in revenue.
It's important to note X and YouTube have different ways to track what a view or impression is on a video or post. The tweet in question from MrBeast has 156.9 million views as of the time of writing. The number of views on the tweet is not equal to the number of people who clicked to watch the video or watched the 16-minute video in its entirety.
Users were also intrigued as to how much the original YouTube video made but that question has not been publicly answered at the time of writing.
As promised, MrBeast was also sharing the revenue earned from the X experiment with his followers.
"I'm gonna give 10 random people that repost this and follow me $25,000 for fun. I'll pick the winners in 72 hours."
Related Link: MrBeast Turned Down $1B For His YouTube Brand — He Believes It’s Worth So Much, He Didn’t ‘Even Want To Say It’
Why It's Important: Since acquiring X (then Twitter) for $44 billion, Elon Musk worked to boost user metrics and pay out ad revenue share to content creators for their posts and videos on the platform.
Musk himself shared the MrBeast video, which may have inflated the reach of his original post. Musk's tweet of the video has 56.8 million views.
It was also alleged X may have promoted the video from MrBeast based on findings from users not disclosing the post as an ad in their feeds.
MrBeast recently said the compensation on X would likely be significantly less than what he earns from YouTube and wouldn't be able to fund the production costs that go into his videos.
"My videos cost millions to make and even if they got a billion views on X it wouldn't fund a fraction of it," MrBeast tweeted. "I'm down though to test stuff once monetization is really cranking!"
Thanks to his success on YouTube, earnings estimates for MrBeast say he made $82 million from June 2022 to June 2023.
The video used as the test has over 215 million views on YouTube since it was released four months ago. In the video, MrBeast shows the different vehicles a person could acquire at various price points from $1 to $100 million.
The vehicles featured in the video include a Tesla Model X Plaid from Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA), a Lamborghini Huracan, a Rezvani Vengeance, an amphibious car, a McLaren F1 and a vehicle that converts into a plane. The $100 million vehicle in the video is a 1952 Ferrari 212 Barchetta Roadster that was a gift from Ferrari NV (NYSE:RACE) founder Enzo Ferrari to Henry Ford.
MrBeast is known for his interactions with X and Elon Musk, which includes a promise from Musk that X would be owned by the content creator if Musk were to die under mysterious circumstances. MrBeast was also a common name mentioned on social media when Musk was looking for a CEO of X.
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Photos: Shutterstock
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