There’s one word that strikes terror in the heart of a creative working on a MrBeast video: “cringe.”
If the world’s top YouTuber calls a video or idea “cringe,” it’s likely dead in its tracks.
MrBeast knows better than anyone what might spark a backlash among his millions of fans, a former staffer said. “If he doesn’t buy into it, it’s not going to work,” they said.
MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, is known for turning YouTube videos into eye-popping spectacles. The 27-year-old creator has buried himself alive, put hundreds of contestants through endurance challenges, and sent a train barreling into a giant pit as an “experiment,” all in the name of viral content. With over 400 million subscribers on his main channel, $473 million in revenue last year across his businesses, and a reality show on Amazon Prime Video, Donaldson is in a league of his own.
So, what does it take to make a MrBeast video — many of which are filmed in Donaldson’s hometown of Greenville, North Carolina? To find out, BI interviewed nine former MrBeast workers and reviewed an internal production guidebook created a few years ago as the YouTuber’s team began expanding. The creatives spoke on the condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak about the company.
What emerged was a portrait of a large-scale content operation that, in many ways, mirrors traditional Hollywood productions — only faster-paced and occasionally more chaotic. Donaldson rejects the notion of being an old-school studio head, and he has eschewed ideas rooted in legacy media. One example: The company previously referred to workers on MrBeast sets as “friends of friends” rather than production assistants. In other ways, his creative instincts align with more traditional Hollywood leaders. Even after investing thousands into a video, for instance, Donaldson will sometimes kill a project if it doesn’t meet his quality standards — much like major studios like Warner Bros. Discovery.
For creatives who make the journey out to Greenville, MrBeast offers competitive pay and an opportunity to move fast and break things.
“You’ll see a lot of former film and TV people dropping everything in their lives in order to move out to Greenville,” the former staffer said.
Here’s BI’s breakdown of what goes into making a MrBeast video, from start to finish:
Step 1: The idea factory
MrBeast takes brainstorming seriously. The creator, who employed about 350 people as of April, has a dedicated ideation team tasked with building a pipeline of potential video ideas.
The ideation team starts by conceptualizing a video title and thumbnail. They cast a wide net and scour YouTube for trending topics and keywords to identify buzzy concepts.
The team sketches out ideas and logs them in a database, then pitches the best ones to Donaldson and a team of creative leads. Hundreds of ideas are logged, but most never make it past this phase.
Another former staffer described the ideation team as a content lab.
“If you come up with enough ideas, you’re going to get those winning ones that are perfect for a viral engine,” they said.
This approach is similar to Hollywood’s traditional development process, said Paul Hardart, director of the entertainment, media, and technology program at NYU’s Stern business school.
“That’s sort of the top of the funnel,” Hardart said. “Writers and talent go and pitch ideas to network executives.”
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Step 2: Is this video even feasible?
If Donaldson greenlights an idea, it’s handed to a group of creative producers for cost and feasibility planning. The company recently added a team dedicated to calculating feasibility, a source familiar with the matter told Business Insider.
Eric Charbonneau/Amazon Prime Video via Getty Images
If the idea is too ambitious to execute, like a scheme to send MrBeast to space, it might get scrapped or put on the back burner. But creatives are careful not to kill an exciting idea prematurely. While staff members at Beast Industries — MrBeast’s company — may fear the word “cringe,” Donaldson has his own dreaded word: “no.” The boss does not like to be told that something can’t happen.
“Don’t just stop because one person told you no, stop when all conceivable options are exhausted,” Donaldson wrote in his production guide.
“‘No’ was the bad word,” the second former staffer said. “You try to save your ‘no’s.'”
If an idea is greenlit and assigned a budget, a producer — or group of producers — is enlisted to manage the project and ensure tasks like building a set and casting aligns with the initial creative vision.
At any given moment, MrBeast has multiple production teams working on different videos, labeled by letters: Team A, Team B, and so on. Depending on the complexity of the project and the number of segments involved, each video can staff anywhere from one to a dozen or more producers.
Those producers wear many hats. They maintain timelines and deadlines for all relevant departments, negotiate with contractors, work with camera, lighting, and audio teams, and ensure compliance with on-set protocols, among other duties. “At Beast, you have to be responsible for everything,” a third former staffer said.
This is typical of YouTube productions, whereas legacy media producers are often more specialized.
“YouTube producers are probably more Swiss Army knives, but in TV, they’re more scalpels,” said Daniel Rosenberg, a writer and producer who cofounded the branded entertainment firm Piro.
Step 3: The Greenville content machine
When building his business, Donaldson and the MrBeast team often came up with their own terms for production roles.
“This is not Hollywood and I do not want to be Hollywood,” Donaldson wrote in his production guide.
The company has a consistent team of workers who build sets, as well as a flurry of production assistants who initially were referred to as “friends of friends” because they were often locals with connections to MrBeast staffers. Friends of friends work on a variety of tasks, from on-set assistance to picking up producers from the Raleigh airport. They’re now part of a team referred to as the “task force.”
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Creative staffers have been referred to as junior Tyler (or mini Tyler), referring to a worker who worked under creative lead Tyler Conklin, three former staffers said.
Depending on the production, a MrBeast video could feature hundreds of cameras on set, capturing a variety of angles (and individual contestants if it’s a challenge where they are facing off against each other). Lengthy video challenges in a nuclear bunker or grocery store would require lots of cameras to film every moment. The camera setup includes DSLRs held by camera operators and strategically placed GoPros.
“If you’re doing a video with 100 contestants, you need at least 100 cameras,” the third former staffer said. “For a really long challenge, there’s a ton of angles. Jimmy is very big on quantity over quality for filming to make sure nothing is missed if anything happens.”
Eric Charbonneau/Amazon Prime Video via Getty Images
By the time Donaldson and other on-camera talent arrive, most of the logistical heavy lifting is already done — which makes it all the more painful for producers if he pulls the plug at that point, deciding the video is no longer a channel fit. The process of determining a fit involves others, as well, a source familiar with the matter told BI. Donaldson listens to feedback from a range of people and considers factors like budget, virality, and the company’s quality standards when determining which projects move forward, they said.
Traditional media productions may similarly throw away work if they feel like it isn’t up to par, Hardart said, pointing to the decision to reshoot the Game of Thrones pilot episode.
Step 4: Cutting down hundreds of hours of footage into minutes
Some of MrBeast’s videos involve 100-day challenges, with cameras rolling all day and night. That produces a lot of footage.
A single video generally enlists up to eight editors, with a few staffers handling daily footage cuts, four or five syncing footage and selecting the best parts of what was filmed, and a couple of lead editors compiling everything.
For videos shot over a longer timeframe, edits are managed in real time.
“If they shoot a video for a week, by the time they get home or leave that island, they already have a very rough cut that someone is doing in real time,” a fourth former employee said.
With editing, the MrBeast team is very focused on how a video will retain viewership on YouTube, known as retention editing.
“He has very specific editing requirements for his editors, not just how much you get done or how fast, but how many seconds into a video are you showing the super funny thing that happens,” a fifth former staffer said.
Donaldson laid out this approach in his production guide, highlighting the importance of using YouTube analytics to identify the exact second when viewership drops off and telling workers that they “must always know what minute mark the content you are working on is.”
“Oftentimes the real storytelling happens in post” production, Hardart said of a traditional Hollywood production. “You can do so much in editing to shape a story.”
Step 5: Press publish, then study viewer data to find out if it worked
After a MrBeast video has a final cut that makes it to YouTube, it’s formatted for multiple languages, put through thumbnail A/B testing, and carefully monitored for viewer retention and performance. It may also be cut for shorter videos on TikTok or YouTube shorts or edited down for age-appropriate content so it can appear on YouTube Kids. MrBeast generally releases one to two longform videos monthly on his main channel, as well as a few videos on other channels focused on gaming or philanthropy. The creator also has a team dedicated to making shorter videos for vertical platforms like TikTok or YouTube shorts.
Donaldson wrote in his production guide that “the cool thing” about YouTube is that the platform gives “super detailed graphs for every video that show the exact second we lose a viewer on every single video.”
From setting up a team focused fully on ideas, to dissecting viewership data to plan his video strategy, Donaldson has laid out the blueprint for building a YouTube empire.
“I feel like in this day and age, so many content creators are trying to be him,” the first former staffer said. “But he will always be MrBeast. He has access to things that no one else does.”
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