MrBeast earns more than $250,000 on video uploaded to Elon Musk's X

If you've been on Elon Musk's X anytime over the past week, you've likely seen MrBeast fill up your feed as the social media app incessantly promoted the popular YouTuber's first video upload to the service across the platform.

MrBeast said the video upload was a test to compare his X earnings with his YouTube payouts and that he'd publicly share how much he made. Well, he has just delivered.

According to MrBeast, X's analytics show that he will make $263,655 off his video. The creator shared the information in a tweet on Monday and included a screenshot of his account's analytics as proof.

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How does it stack up to YouTube?

In July 2023, MrBeast shared with his paying X Subscribers that what was then his most recent YouTube video made $167,000 in ad share revenue after receiving 77 million views in 5 days.

As of publication, MrBeast's post containing his first X video upload has around 157 million views, which is roughly double what MrBeast's YouTube video received in July. But, his earnings on X are only around $100,000 more than what MrBeast earned from that YouTube video with less than half as many views.

What do these revenue stats mean?

There are some major addendums here as metrics on YouTube and X are far from equal. 

For one, X's view count isn't for the video itself. Back when X was still known as Twitter, the company publicly displayed how many views a video received. However, Musk removed public view metrics from video posts in May 2023. Now, only the account that posted the video has access to these stats. The public view stat is just for the post itself, meaning it counts users who never clicked play or watched the video.

And those 157 million views are not all views. On X, those views are impressions. This means that this metric counts a view for something as simple as when a post shows up in a user's feed because the algorithm recommended it.

There's also something interesting about the MrBeast screenshot: It appears to show a dashboard that's not available to most users.

X has a monetization program that users can apply to join after subscribing to the platform's paid verified subscription services like X Premium or X Premium+. Once a user is accepted into that program, they can start earning revenue based on how many other verified paying subscribers view ads that show up in the replies to their posts. 

A Monetization tab also becomes accessible for a user approved for ad share revenue, showing that user how much they've made every two weeks – or when they've accumulated enough ad share revenue for a payout. Nothing in MrBeast's screenshot looks like that Monetization tab.

MrBeast's screenshot looks much more like X's Analytics page. Yet, the vast majority of users do not have a revenue tab on their Analytics page like MrBeast does.

Pre-roll video ads ran on MrBeast's video, which means that the creator is part of X's Amplify program. Amplify allows very select users, usually big brand accounts, to get paid for the pre-roll video ads that appear before their video content. I checked with an account that's part of the Amplify program and can indeed confirm this is the same monetization dashboard that members of the Amplify program have access to.

MrBeast's quarter of a million dollar payout from X is based on X's Amplify pre-roll ads monetization, an invite-only program that, according to X, only has 200+ publishers.

MrBeast did it, but you probably can't

Speaking of MrBeast's unique situation, YouTube's most popular creator had other benefits that pretty much no other user on X has to replicate his success.

MrBeast acknowledged some of this himself in his tweet announcing his payout.

"It’s a bit of a facade," MrBeast wrote. "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."

That's part of it. But, there's even more.

Musk has been trying to get more YouTube creators and podcasters on X over the past year as video increasingly looks to be a major part of Musk's vision for the platform. 

MrBeast originally passed on uploading his content to X, saying he did not believe Musk's social media platform could compete with YouTube when it came to payouts for creators. But, MrBeast, real name Jimmy Donaldson, relented last week and uploaded one of his older YouTube videos on Jan.15 and said it was part of a test to see how it would perform, revenue-wise.

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Since then, MrBeast's post has been relentlessly promoted on the platform — by official X accounts, by Musk, and, as Mashable previously reported, by X's advertising platform as an unlabeled ad being pushed across users' feeds.

So, it's easy to see how MrBeast had an unfair advantage when compared to any other X user. The real question that remains to be answered is: Will MrBeast continue to upload his future content directly to X?

UPDATE: Jan. 22, 2024, 5:22 p.m. EST This piece was updated to add confirmation that MrBeast's revenue is from X's Amplify program.