When a YouTuber gets too big

MrBeast’s No Good, Rotten, Very Bad Summer

Jimmy Donaldson, known to the world as MrBeast, is having a tough time right now. And I’ve been holding off on covering it because, one, the election got real interesting and, two, the exact reasons Donaldson is having such a bad summer are, like everything involving YouTube drama, messy and confusing. But based on some data that Garbage Day researcher Adam and I have been tracking for the last few months, it does look like an era of MrBeast is coming to close. And it’s not clear if the YouTuber will make it to the next one.

Allegations of an unsafe work environment on Donaldson’s sets have followed him around for years, but finally came to a head back in March after he announced he was producing a game show called Beast Games for Amazon Prime. Which he called at the time “the largest game show in history.”

According to one contestant that spoke to TIME, players were fed “a hard-boiled egg, two slices of cucumber, and basically one-third of a stick of celery that was also cut into thirds,” and some oatmeal. They were also forced to sleep in sleeping bags in the middle of a stadium. And at one point while filming, Donaldson’s crew lost control of the crowd and people started to get trampled. The New York Times reported that over a dozen people were injured. A rep from Donaldson in a statement to The Times blamed the chaos on the CrowdStrike outage (lol ok).

But the real onslaught of bad press around Donaldson started in late July after allegations surfaced that his long-time friend and collaborator Ava Kris Tyson was sending sexual messages to a minor in the MrBeast Discord. Tyson denied any accusations of grooming, but apologized for “unacceptable social media posts,” calling them “bad edgy jokes,” and stepped away from MrBeast productions. According to Rolling Stone, who viewed 500,000 messages from the Discord, Tyson was sharing pornographic links and was regularly deleting offensive messages from the chat.

The wave of backlash against Donaldson following Tyson stepping down was both intense and complicated. And it unfortunately can’t be separated from the fact that Tyson is a trans woman and Donaldson’s genuinely supportive friendship with Tyson has long been scrutinized by, well, everyone. And I don’t think it’s an accident that, only a week after the Tyson news broke, suddenly vague and unverified rumors appeared online that Donaldson was running some kind of pedophile ring.

These can be traced back to a former MrBeast employee named Dawson French who, posting under the name DogPack404, published two massively viral videos calling Donaldson a fraud, a sociopath, and alleged there was sexual misconduct inside the company. He also claimed that Donaldson had knowingly hired a registered sex offender. Jake Franklin, a former MrBeast collaborator, then confirmed that one of Donaldson’s crew members was in fact a registered sex offender, Franklin’s brother-in-law. Hnown to fans by the nickname “Delaware”. Both men have since stopped working with Donaldson and The Daily Mail is reporting that Donaldson hired celebrity lawyer Alex Spiro and has sent French a cease and desist over the videos, calling them “misinformation”.

Then, finally, Donaldson’s old, offensive videos resurfaced following the Tyson scandal. The most damning being a stream where Donaldson read out user comments, letting them write anything they want, including slurs, which he would then recite.

What I’m about to say isn’t meant to minimize any of this, but almost everything that’s happening to Donaldson right now is a textbook “YouTuber got too big” problem. Very few, if any, have ever pulled off the transition that Donaldson is attempting right now — from thing you do in your bedroom to real production company. They accumulate weird employees and horrible workflows built out of the pressure of chasing YouTube traffic and implode when they try and turn professional. As I learned during an investigation into Donaldson’s charity work back in June, his network of businesses are a mess. His philanthropy project is run by a South African real estate agent with seemingly no experience in film production or philanthropy. And if you reach out to them for comment they automatically send you back a JPG of a stock response written in his custom Comic Sans subtitle font.

But Donaldson is also in a tough spot because if he doesn’t successfully make the jump from YouTube to Amazon, it’s looking more and more likely that he won’t be able to hold his top spot on YouTube. As Adam and I reported in Sherwood this week, Donaldson became the most followed YouTuber in history this summer, but an army of clones ripping off his format are closing in. In July, four out of the five most-followed YouTube channels were MrBeast rip-offs. The fifth, at number one, was Donaldson.

In the past, when a specific style of video thoroughly saturated YouTube, it was typically attacked like spam by the site’s ever changing algorithm. The term most commonly used for MrBeast videos is “retention editing,” and it’s not outlandish to think that another correction is coming. In fact, Donaldson, an obsessive student of YouTube history, seems to suspect the same thing. In March, he claimed he was moving away from his old style and experimenting with new formats. So now he’s stuck in a bind. He can’t endlessly tweak and optimize his Amazon show, but has to rely on his patchwork staff to make it work. The squeaky clean image he needs to sustain his kid-friendly YouTube empire is crashing and burning. And now he be losing his home-field advantage online, both to imitators and a fickle algorithm.

The walls are closing in and he’s finally hit the first thing he can’t optimize his way out of: public opinion.

Adam Bumas contributed reporting to this piece.

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A Good Post

Keith Lee Goes To Washington

@keith_lee125

💕 Keith Speaks 💕 God Bless You 🙏🏽 #foodcritic 💕

Keith Lee is a true TikTok success story. He has 16 million followers on the app and his channel mainly highlights food from black-run restaurants. He’s also cultivated a unique style. Most of his videos are shot in his car. His reviews are calming and polite and largely focused on highlighting smaller restaurants that might not get a lot of attention. This is also why he doesn’t typically post bad reviews of specific restaurants. Which is admirable, but hasn’t insulated him from controversy.

Last November, he pissed off, well, all of Atlanta, it seems, after he complained that the city’s restaurants were trying to give him special treatment and care more about social media optics than taste. And this week he’s kicked off another discourse cycle after he declared that reviewing food in Washington, DC, wouldn’t be “constructive”. Brutal.

Now, I like Lee. And I do think he’s an incredible advocate for small businesses. But I also tend to agree with the users complaining that his palate is a little simple which limits what he reviews. And I also think Lee’s status in the food world is indicative of a problem across most of the culture industry right now. Which was said best by a contact of mine in the music industry complaining about a particularly melon-shaped music critic that also has a penchant for causing weird low-stakes drama. To paraphrase: When all the critics lost their jobs, it didn’t kill criticism, it just left a vacuum that was filled in by some folks that probably weren’t meant to be the only critics left and now we have to fight about their opinions all the time.

The Swifties Have Mobilized

Swifties For Kamala met on Zoom this week and ended up raising over $100,000. The call included Carole King and Sen. Elizabeth Warren and is, as far as I can tell, the first true political mobilization of a fandom like this. There have been attempts in the past, but never at this level. We should also exclude furries and juggalos here, who, of course, have been doing this sort of thing for a while. So I guess you could say Swifties For Kamala the first mainstream fandom to organize like this.

The call was organized by Annie Wu, the viral-political mastermind behind Sen. John Fetterman’s social media strategy. (Whatever happened to that guy? Does he still do politics?)

Threads Is Simply Not A Serious Website

The Washington Post is reporting that Threads is currently blocking COVID related searches. For context, Threads only got a search feature that actually worked a week ago. If you search “COVID” on Threads it won’t show anything. And Meta confirmed to The Post that’s on purpose.

If you’ll allow me to rant a bit here. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote a letter to the Judiciary committee this week whining about how he felt pressured to “censor” COVID misinformation at the height of the pandemic. He likes to feed the “don’t censor us” line to Republicans every time he thinks Democrats are gearing up for another round of antitrust scrutiny. But no one censors Meta’s apps more than Meta. Facebook, Instagram, and Threads have never had a way to actually search them. And CrowdTangle, the last remaining tool that could show you what was happening on Facebook, shut down this month.

Zuckerberg and Meta don’t care about censorship. They have two goals. The first, and most important, is to do as little moderation as possible on their apps because they have too many users and no sustainable way to monitor what they’re posting. And the second is to hide that fact by obscuring the content on their platforms with limited search tools and algorithmic filtering.

Why Is Gen Z So Bad At Going To Concerts?

Here’s a new update in the Gen Z coolness crisis. They’re bad at concerts. The bulk of this discourse is based on a few photos of young concertgoers camped out on the barricades at the All Points East festival last week.

But this has been a complaint for a while. There was a whole thing earlier this year where Gen Z audiences were pissing off artists like Death Grips to the point where they were ending their sets early. And I’ve seen a bunch of explanations as to why this keeps happening, the most popular theory being that we have a young generation of feral Zoom school kids that have never been outside before. But I’m going to throw another at you.

I went to a Harry Styles concert a few years back and noticed something sort of interesting. It didn’t look like the pop concerts I had been to in the 90s, the 2000s, or even the 2010s. The young crowd was overwhelmingly dressed up as Styles, wearing handmade outfits that matched his various looks over the years, and spent a bulk of the show taking photos with each other. And I realized that it looked more like Comic Con than it did a concert. This is, in my opinion, the key trend that Taylor Swift capitalized on for her Eras Tour.

I’m not saying Gen Z isn’t annoying. All young people are annoying. But I do think the expectations of what a concert is have drastically changed and performers and venues — and older audience members — aren’t really prepared for it.

A Good Art Brush

Some Stray Links

• “Photos of European influencers used to push pro-Trump propaganda on fake X accounts”

• “What's behind Harris' social media dominance”

P.S. here’s some good Sonic fan art.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***