The following is a teaser of ADWEEK’s August cover story, which was featured in On Background with Mark Stenberg, a free, weekly newsletter that explores the key themes shaping the media industry. You can sign up for it here.
On a Friday morning in June, Jimmy Donaldson—better known as MrBeast—notched a digital media milestone, becoming the first person to surpass 500 million subscribers on YouTube, making his viewership larger than the combined populations of the U.S. and Canada.
But inside his North Carolina studio hangs a plaque that has little to do with subscriber counts. It reads “YouTube first,” a motto that still governs the Beast Industries operation, according to its chief executive Jeff Housenbold, even if the company it anchors no longer looks much like a YouTube channel.
Instead, the business now more closely resembles a diversified conglomerate, encompassing a chocolate brand, a toy manufacturer, a brand studio, a competition show on Prime Video, a financial services app, and, coming later this year, a mobile telecommunications platform.
