The YouTuber James “MrBeast” Donaldson is the biggest YouTuber in the world, but the 25-year-old has found a way to grow even further in 2023: His channel has been on the rise since December 2022. He has even broken the barrier of 2 billion views per month. The crucial step was translating his videos into 12 languages.
What is the trick?
- In July 2021, MrBeast started opening new YouTube channels where he translated the content of his English-speaking main channel into other languages. For this, he founded a company.
- However, in December 2022 he stopped doing that and decided to offer multilingual tracks on his YouTube channel: The translations are now included in the original video.
- The supported languages include: Arabic, Bengali, French, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, and Vietnamese (via mrbeast.fandom).
His YouTube career hasn’t been as strong as MrBeast’s:
From 300 million views per month to 2 billion
What are the effects? With the old system, MrBeast was already huge: He consistently reached views in the range of 300 to 600 million per month. For any other YouTuber, that would already be gigantic.
Since switching to the new model, his channel has entered entirely new realms:
He now has at least 940 million viewers per month; in the peak month of September, there were even 2 billion views.
He has also grown significantly in subscriptions and now stands at 193 million.
MrBeast has turned adversity into an opportunity
How is this being discussed? On reddit, there is discussion about the huge increase at MrBeast:
- One person says he is amazed that the channel continues to grow. He thought the peak of the channel was reached in 2022 – after all, at the end of 2021, his Squid Game video was considered legendary.
- A second user gushingly says: It was simply a brilliant decision by MrBeast to translate the channel into different languages.
- A third user says: MrBeast is forced to do so. If he doesn’t offer translations, people would simply steal his content and translate it themselves. That’s a huge audience that he would be missing out on.
YouTube has used MrBeast as a test subject
This is what YouTube itself says about it: In a blog post, YouTube even used MrBeast as an example of why this change was made. They had already asked him and a small number of creators in 2022 to test the new feature, and he translated his videos into 11 languages (via blog.youtube).
They found that creators could increase their reach by 15% with this. In February 2023, the feature was then opened up for more users.
However, MrBeast doesn’t seem to have increased his views by just 15%, but rather by around 300% – and this was apparently not even MrBeast’s brilliant idea, but YouTube’s.
More about MrBeast:
“He has ruined YouTube”: Gaming YouTuber sharply criticizes MrBeast in a 43-second clip
