The Nearly Impossible Job of Managing MrBeast

in may of 2017 mr beast crossed one million subscribers but there was a problem some months were spending like four or five million dollars on videos we've ran out of money many times i'm not a businessman i'm a creator so if jimmy doesn't care about the money who does he had a million subscribers when i met him and he was like i'm gonna have 10 million subscribers by the end of the year and he was like i need money to fund these videos this is reid he's been jimmy's manager for the past five years he left his job as a sports agent to work with channels like dude perfect during youtube's early years i thought consumer loyalty was shifting from corporation to individual now he runs a management company called knight media which represents some of the biggest creators in the world we sat down with him to hear some untold stories about mr beast hey jimmy we need a sponsor on this video or we don't have any money left we gotta stop the gun stuff how did jimmy do this this is what becomes dangerous about youtube and ask him how creators can build long-lasting businesses on youtube okay let's just like break this down yeah that's what creators need to do to prepare [Music] all right before we get into the interview we want to thank the sponsor of this episode nordvpn if you're using the internet and you don't use a vpn yet it's definitely something you should be using and if you use our link which is in the description then not only do you get to use a vpn but you also get to support our show if you don't know what a vpn is let's explain typically when you use the internet the connection is directly between your device and the website but that's super easy to hack with a vpn your information is encrypted on the way in as well as on the way out a vpn hides your ip address and internet traffic to keep you safe from any people looking to grab your sensitive data another perk of having a vpn when i was in europe was i could actually log into a server in the united states and see what was trending on youtube in the us while i was traveling you just get it you travel the man's a traveler and nordvpn is not just a vpn they also recently launched threat protection which protects you from malicious websites malware hackers and intrusive ads this is something that i got my parents set up on because they will click on anything that pops up on their screen so head to the link in the description nordvpn.com collin and sameer it's completely risk-free there's a 30-day money-back guarantee and it costs about the cost of a cup of coffee a month so thanks so much to nord for supporting creators like us and now two untold stories about mr beast so reed how much money do you make i was like all right no money questions first question which one did you tell us every single creator how much they make i'll give you i'll give you a range it's between like zero and i don't even want to say it with the high rates so your uh your like entrance into this world is really fascinating because you came across dude perfect yeah i did pretty early on it was like uh 2014 dude perfect when does jimmy come into the picture uh january of 2018. oh wow i remember three years we met each other when we had really had nothing i mean i didn't have a business yet it was just me he basically sent me a twitter message and for the next month we just spoke every few days i thought he was just the most fascinating person because i would just listen to him talk about youtube he showed me this graph at the time and it was essentially like a y-axis and x-axis and he had all his videos dotted on this graph and there was a correlation between all the videos based on the the ctr and the avd of the video and he's like i did all this research i've done it for multiple channels if i can get in like this ctr plus this avd videos get over 10 million views and so in his mind he was like that's all i care about is getting this ctr and this abd on videos and i know my videos are going to get over 10 million views he did say he had a million subscribers when i met him and he was like i'm gonna have 10 million subscribers by the end of the year okay 9 million subs in a year like this guy's crazy but he was like no here's here's what i'm going to do and he kind of laid out the plan of how he was going to grow and i was like okay as crazy as this sounds i'm willing to help you and he was like i need money to fund these videos but he ended up crossing the year at 13 point i think 13.3 million wow at the end of 2018 and then i can't even remember what 2019 was but i think it was like 26 million by the end of the year or something like it just went nuts considering his growth and his success was it like okay i'm starting to work with this guy he's pretty wild he's cutting a table in half with a plastic knife and whatever the hell yeah what he's watching paint dry like whatever this dude is doing and it's just like boom it worked and no absolutely not the amount of people i called that were like no chance yeah you know he's got kids he's from you know middle of nowhere we don't understand the content he's watching it's everyday bro for 24 hours like no nobody can't sell anything jimmy was like early on like there were some questionable videos where he was like shooting certain things like our biggest video was can 50 000 magnets stop a bullet 57 million views in three days and in 2018 that was a banger right yeah and uh most people were like whoa gun no way right and so that that was one thing that held us back a lot and him and i talked about it a lot in the early days is like we got to stop the gun stuff but even that what's interesting is that's like mythbusters i agree right like there's a format of that on television and there are ads that play before that video but uh but uh 18 year old kid middle of nowhere you know shooting stuff at random was like not something people were going to sponsor it wasn't on tv it wasn't on tv it wasn't it didn't have that feeling of like control around the environment yeah there wasn't a production company it was like hey jimmy gunn yeah we can't sell that yeah and so it became just mobile games at the beginning that's all i could convince like i couldn't convince big advertising agencies to even touch it so it became like um world of tanks and like all these random mobile games that thankfully sponsored videos because then we got to just pull off crazy stuff early on if it wasn't for those mobile games i don't know if we would have got brand deals in the first two years it was so difficult it would have been honey and that's it when did you get the sense in that year that he was going to become like your premier client i don't even think i still view him as that like i'm just we're so close i i mean we're business partners at this point we've done so much together we bicker like an old couple i mean we've been together i think four and a half years like ever he it was just him chris an editor and his mother when i met him he's a very small team uh i think i realized that jimmy was gonna be something special on youtube first sponsor video with honey was you guys probably remember was like donating to ninja andrew was doing a charity live stream and i remember him pitching it to honey and they were so excited with the idea and i was kind of like on the fence like all right is this twitter donation thing played out he he was so particular about that stat edit and how it was edited and how the video intro looked that's when i knew i was like his brain just works differently than any other creator i've met to this point like if he's thinking about what does this 10 second intro look like and he's obsessing over that i've never heard a creator obsess over a 10 second intro in my life but he's like this is how important this is because this is literally the hook of why people would stay for this 20 minute video and so that video went on to get i don't know 70 million views i'm sure to to this day he still has the number one most downloaded day for honey ever and that was that ninja video and in that first year like what was the type of money that would get you an integration 50k we would do these those deals all day but we wanted cpm deals we basically wanted a 20 cpm with a minimum so we'd be like 30k minimum 20 cpm up to 125 000 cap yeah so if the video i can't do quick math but if the video get all the way up to 125 000 on that cpm we'd hit the cap and they'd have to pay us that money those are the deals we wanted to do and so that's how we started doing it because it's it's easy to negotiate base fees for someone that pulls a million views on average every single views jimmy was growing so quickly month over month that it was so hard to value his videos and i would like send out pricing to a brand and they would be like not now and they'd call me back six months later and be like hey we have budget and i'd be like it's way more it's tripled so i don't know what to tell you yeah and it still kind of does that to this day it's like so hard to value his videos because like squid game gets 260 million views the next video gets 130 so it's so hard does the job get harder for you as time goes on as his operation explodes as you bring on more employees more clients i don't know if it gets harder it gets more complicated and it's definitely more stressful there there was a level of stress of hey jimmy we need a sponsor on this video or we don't have any money left but the stress is completely different now we're dealing we're in the public eye if someone gets a bad hamburger we hear about it on twitter it's just there's a different level of stress that comes with it there's there's infinite possibility where do you focus your energy and so that's i think for him and i that's become the tough part is like the amount of distractions that are now in both of our lives is really hard to navigate sometimes so it it feels like um with jimmy there was a inflection point on the squid game video like that felt like a substantial change to me and maybe it was also this time last year when we went out and saw the massive you know new studio there but i'm curious if when he first brought up that idea to you of squid game in real life if you thought that was a good idea a good investment of money like what was that conversation like and how did how does how has that changed the mr beast we see today yeah i mean i always thought it was a great idea i was worried about how expensive the idea was going to be because i know that jimmy in his mind was like i need to build everything to a t to the scale that they had it which he did so i was like okay it's gonna be not only incredibly expensive it's gonna take a long time to build these sets and so we were able to you know get that done in three to four weeks but it did it put him in another level i think he finally like had another layer of breakthrough to this like traditional world where now every time i talk to someone and a lot of people that probably wouldn't have known who he was are now like oh the guy that made squid game it's like it feels like everyone watched that video it's really interesting looking at the analytics of that video too there's three million people in south korea that viewed that video so it's like we can see everyone around the world it says 260 million views or something like that so we can see everyone around the world that's viewed that video and so i think it's just it it kind of transcended like what he was currently doing which was maybe 70 million views of video and put him into something that was like fully in pop culture and what was popular in the world putting his spin on it and it just completely taking over for i don't know 46 48 hours like however long i think it was like three days it got up to 150 million views do you think that since then there's been a different amount of pressure that he's put on himself or that you guys fail too like every video now i think you kind of view it as like if squid game is the bar yeah like what's the next video gonna be right which which is is kind of hard in his position because you have to continually one-up yourself this is what becomes dangerous about youtube is when you're when you're in the game that jimmy's in you ha you're each video has to be better than the next but when you make a video like squid game that is just a masterpiece that next video that you put out has to be a masterpiece as well and i think it's like one of the reasons you didn't see jimmy post for three months it's like he was like how do you how do i follow this up i gained 10 million subscribers in 30 days the video has 200 million views like what is the next video and so i think it was like really hard for him to kind of like wrap his head around that with like if this is the bar then it's going to be really hard for us to continually take this up yeah i think the thing i i noticed um in the beginning of this year with jimmy is like he's uploading significantly less on the main channel right but at the same time reacts and gaming are incredibly consistent and i'm curious if that's a conversation that you guys have around like or that he talks about of like having almost like it feels like an engine uh because like no matter what there's a new mr beast video it's just not on yeah mr beast yeah i mean that was kind of by design right if we're not going to post 30 i can't even remember the amount of videos we posted in 2019 but i think it was in the 40s wow and then it went down to like 31 then it went down like it's it's continually went down year over year but you need more touch points then if you're only going to post 12 videos a year one a month you need more touch points so people are continually seeing your face yeah or else like youtube's interesting if you're a kid and i've i've like weirdly had this conversation with like some of my like cousins who are really young and i'm like do you watch jimmy and in the past they'd be like yeah but he doesn't upload enough so i like watch this person and this person this person now it's like we have a video that goes up every single week if not every four days because we have all these different channels now b's philanthropy shorts uh gaming and now reacts and so it's it was by design i mean i think it's also those videos also help fund the craziness that happens on the main channel so it's a it's a deeper source of revenue but i'm now seeing a lot of creators replicate that model does selling get more difficult as jimmy's videos take longer to make uh it doesn't become more difficult it just becomes harder on me going back and asking for more time and more time and more time like we've had situations where we've signed a deal video is supposed to go up in june it's now november and they're like what the hell is going on where's our video and i'm just like jimmy's just filming good videos i don't know i don't know there was too much wind on this project he's definitely left me out to dry a few times but like he's trying to make the best videos possible like i totally get it so it's like i'll take that bullet all the time to be like hey you're not getting a video this month i know you have to spend your budget but like we're trying to make the best video possible and you're gonna get a banger when it goes up you're gonna have to wait another 60 days and most people have been fine with it i think because they're like we really want a mr beast video yeah but some people have been incredibly upset when i come back and i'm like hey your video that was supposed to up in november is probably not going to go up until january i'm curious if um there have been moments you know or if there were even moments in that first year with jimmy or since then that you had like almost oh moments together in a good way or a bad way well let's let's do both honestly there's been so many um the first one was the 50 000 magnet stop a bullet that was like one of the moments where we were like wait how do we replicate this we just got 20 million views in a day like how is that possible that was that was one of the first ones opening day of mr beastberger was kind of like a holy and a bad way moment we were we knew it was going to be successful i don't think we really had planned for how crazy it was going to be and for you guys on the outside you were probably like how did jimmy do this i was getting calls from so many creators that were so confused yeah they were like i don't understand how you guys open 300 restaurants in one single day right and now i'm on doordash and i can order mr beesberger like so many people are so confused but the sheer amount of orders on that first night was so wild we had like 100 cars waiting outside restaurants waiting for their orders and there wasn't enough delivery drivers to order the amount of hamburgers that were being ordered and then every place was running out of buns and hamburgers and so people were calling me like we don't have any more buns and then someone would have to drive to a grocery store to get buns and it was just utter circus and jimmy and i like sat on our couches and we were on twitter for like six hours surplus we had no customer support like we had zero customer support and people were just yelling on twitter about like not receiving their orders for like two hours and him and i were just playing damage control that was like a holy in a bad way and the next morning i woke up and we just like looked at each other and we were like how what just happened how do we fix this it was like a holy this is the coolest thing we've ever done to oh my god this is a fire how are we going to deal with this literally within an hour and now mr beesberger is what it is but that the first 48 hours are probably probably the most stressful part most stressful thing i've ever been a part of why do you have an appetite for that level of exposure and risk in these projects we're just trying to like break barriers and kind of like set the bar like we want to show other creators what's possible and the first person through the wall usually gets the bloodiest and in the mr beast burger scenario like it was brutal the first 48 hours were brutal but i mean i wouldn't do anything like i wouldn't take back the idea i think what we did opened everyone's eyes to virtual dining and the scalability of it and how crazy it can get um same with finger on the app like 1.6 million people playing like it was wild to us just like watching the data on the back end of like all these people moving their thumbs wild and so it's like i wouldn't change anything about it i just think when we're trying to innovate and we're also doing these things really quickly like mr beast was like three months of planning it wasn't like years it was like we had three months to pull this off and so it's like some things just get lost in that process and it's like feasible as we did completely different because of that like we learned a lot from both of those cases that like you have to be able to solve for things that could potentially go wrong um i mean one's like like chocolate melting right obvious and so like we have giant bricks that like ship with our chocolate just so chocolate doesn't melt but if we wouldn't have done mr beesberger probably prior to that we probably wouldn't even have thought of that we'd have been like oh people would get chipped chocolate great and then it all melted and then we would have had to deal with it after the fact so it's just it's put us in a different mindset of like okay how many things can go wrong let's actually just think about those for the next like two months and let's prepare for that i think a lot of creators like when they see something like feastables or prime like logan and ksi did like they want to do something similar right like we all want to show that other side of ourself like build a business that can last after maybe we're done making videos but hearing you talk about like the problems that you guys had to face yeah clearly there's like takes a lot of money it takes a lot of people and i'm sure now feasibles has a ton of employees like yeah right like what is it actually i mean i was joking about that the other day because there was a team meeting for feastables and i sent him like a screenshot of the team meeting and i was like dude look at all these people i was like this used to just be you and i and like jim who's the ceo yeah and we so this is kind of like our philosophy with festivals it was we wanted to create a product that was really good that we thought his fan base could could really gravitate towards so it's like product market fit of better for you snacks we knew jimmy's community would convert the last piece of this equation was like we needed a really good ceo because we knew jimmy and i weren't going to be able to focus on this business and so we were lucky enough to meet his name's jim murray he was the former president of rx bar he had our rx bar just sold and he was at the end of his like buy out non-compete and we started interviewing people and we met him and like instantly jimmy and i were like this is the guy like we found the guy and so we ended up hiring him eventually hired the ceo of rxbar and we just started hiring out the executive team without them this business would have been an utter disaster and i think this is like one thing that creators need to remember is if you're starting businesses you're not going to be the ceo of every business jimmy's not the ceo of mr beastberger he's not the ceo of feasibles like those are separate teams separate people thinking about those businesses every day so if you're a creator right now it's like i want to start x business go find people that can help you run that business don't think you're going to be the cmo the ceo it just doesn't work like you it's the same with your production you need good people to make good videos you need good people in these businesses for them to last and have success because if you're the only one thinking about like your chocolate bar company it's not going to succeed so i was like without that like this company doesn't happen i mean like with our newsletter we got newsletter people right because we've never launched the newsletter before right yeah we were talking about this off camera i was like what's that company look like you're like writer and like person that run general manager i was like of course like you have to yeah if you guys are gonna start multiple business units like you have to have people responsible for each one and that's what i've seen creators really screw up is they think that the biggest piece of the equation is like i have community i have an audience i can promote product product will be successful no these are all these all come down to people businesses like you can maybe have a giant marketing funnel but if you don't know how to run and operate a company it's not going to work like it may work for six months eventually this has to become a business and so that's like really where we started with both of these is like who is responsible for these business and what does that team look like yeah so what is now i know you shared this on linkedin patty galloway's graphic of like a creator business right and how it how it is diversified and different parts of it in your experience right now like is there a today a classic model of creator business like if there's a young creator they start you know making it they get a million subs uh is there a like okay here's how it works we're gonna get you some brand deals we're gonna launch you know business with you is there is does that exist or is it different for every creator i don't think it's different for every creator i think if you're a youtuber right now it kind of goes in the same line is it's like same with hiring right it's like you usually hire an editor a thumbnail artist and a production person then a creative it kind of works the same way with uh like just to say monetization is adsense usually comes first right i've seen instances where apparel comes first if the content is too edgy to run ads but i would say the majority of the time adsense is the first revenue stream the second revenue stream is almost always your first second third brand deal right usually people don't launch apparel before brands come into the fold and those brands can be affiliate deals they could be base feed deals so it's usually adsense brand sponsorships then apparel usually comes third where this gets interesting is like bubble four five six seven right i've seen like content syndication um other products and services like cpg now we're getting into like paywall services like patreon and fansly and only fans and so and and then there's another layer of this which is like twitch prime subs or youtube memberships but usually the first three are always adsense brand sponsorships apparel very rarely i i could see a paywall service maybe coming first but that you that person is usually just like i'm on patreon i'm not like a massive youtube creator right so it's i would say for the most part at least everyone we've worked with that's been the exact same philosophy or the exact same revenue model yeah i would say we we only differ in that uh adsense was never significant for us but you still made money on it we still made money on it yeah it was still the first dollars we made as a creator so that's that's right when you look at us and what we do as creators are there certain avenues that you think we should go down yeah like what's your advice i mean it's like your audience is like me right or people that are in their 20s that want to be aspiring creators or maybe are creators that are growing it feels to me like courses about content creation is like the one that sticks out the most i know you guys sold hats and they sold out instantly but that's like a specialty item right that people want like that's interesting instead of you guys having like an always-on store where that item no longer becomes special um and i've seen it where like nelk and elk's a good example of they knew alcohol was gonna be an interesting space for them and now they sell all these like alcohol adjacent things like they sell the bottle openers they sell the beer pong like cups like they sell all that stuff but for you guys it feels like courses makes a ton of sense um of course this is our alcohol basically yeah it's probably not as scalable but it has the same sex appeal yeah of course like one question that we actually got on our reddit yesterday that had to do with management um there's a creator that asked us you know they're starting to see some some deals come in they want help on it but they were asking about how managers get paid um when it comes to either a manager taking you know a percentage across all of your income or just management acquired income and i'm just curious if you can kind of explain that or explain how typically management works for creativity it's honestly so dependent on the management company some management companies will be like we're going to take a percentage of everything which includes adsense i would say the majority of management companies right now in in the digital space will not commission adsense at least everything that i've seen some of them i won't name them by names but some of them are still trying to do those deals we've kind of backed off from that over the years the the mcn world kind of ruined that for the managers it's also the difference between music and every other space and digital is everything's commissionable in music and in digital like you if you're not commissioning the adsense that's usually half 60 of the business you're not commissioning so most managers commission we call it found money so like they're doing an apparel deal for you if they're negotiating a brand deal that's all found money and that will usually get a percentage fee coming off the top that's a that's good terminology for people to know yeah found money what's something that you think creators generally don't understand about the job of being a manager i don't think they understand how much work goes into just getting someone to agree to do a brand deal there's a there's a lot of stuff that just doesn't funnel into emails i would say the majority of what we do does not funnel into emails it's really relationship building uh like like some of the stuff that either jimmy or preston or ryan or people have done in our company i've had to build that relationship for two years you meet them at vidcon you take them out to coffee you just like slowly get to know them all of a sudden they're like we just signed a new client this would be perfect for reid's client so in that spirit of educating i do think it'd be really interesting to kind of talk about we get this question a lot what's the difference between a manager an agent and you know maybe a president like someone who's in-house like yeah as a young creator who's maybe starting to establish a business what what at what stage do they need which one or do they yeah do different people need different okay so i'll pick this apart um i'll start with the first one what's the difference between the three and i think it's it's so dependent on traditional versus music versus digital because managers agents like they do different things across different verticals so if we're just talking specifically in in traditional the agent has has mainly been the person that's sending you on additions their auditions they're negotiating contracts they're they're really like funneling the business opportunity to the manager to then bring to the client the agent's doing most of the work in digital it's almost the opposite what we've kind of found is the manager is kind of the like most important person because they're in the weeds of the business they understand what the creator needs they understand if if they need to hire what people they need to hire at least the good managers they understand this the agents have unfortunately kind of got leveraged out of the digital space a little bit because i think the managers have have started to almost do the agent's job they started to do the brand partnerships and they passed the contract to a lawyer so it's a little different now than it was in traditional traditional still works very similar most actors actually have an agent a manager what i've kind of noticed in this digital sphere that we live in is most creators just have a manager or most creators just have an agent and they kind of play the same role in this in this area a little bit what we're really focused on that agents really struggle with is we like to think about how they how they innovate like what are this what's your strategy for the business like how do you grow your production company whereas like on the agent side it's very transactional they're very focused on like how do we just continue to get 10 percent right and if this brand deal doesn't work like let's quickly go throw it to this person or this person or this person so we try not to be as transactional as that and so that to me is like the biggest difference the president inside a digital company for the most part these are production companies and it seems like the president plays that like head of production role or the head of operations role for the most part they're kind of like helping doing the hiring they're operationalizing the business they're hiring production managers and editors and thumbnail artists at least that's like when we think about different companies across even jimmy's like it's mainly like a head of production is that present person right now so the president role doesn't necessarily like threaten the manager role in europe i mean we haven't seen that now the other like interesting thing and wme and ca have done this really well is they built these companies over decades so they have this network effect they know what's going on everywhere they know what casting directors are doing this they know what brands are spending like they've built this massive network effect that's really valuable and so it's like something that knight is like finally built it's like we have that network effect because we have our ears the ground on everything it's really hard to replicate that inside of just one company so say like jimmy hires someone who's like supposed to do the manager job it's really hard for them to build that like network effect to know what's going on know what netflix is looking for know what this brand is spending on like it's just it's really tough and so i think it's why we haven't seen that done very well why most creators still outsource to a manager is for that very reason so as jimmy's manager or somebody's been there since a million subscribers what does it feel like for him to cross 100 million i was like all alone received this like package from youtube in my austin apartment and i've like i've seen the 10 million diet like we have a lot of craters with 10 million we've seen a lot of these things it was a very surreal moment opening this package for this like red box and you open it and it's like it's much heavier it's thicker so it's like i had like a little moment with myself of kind of like reflection like thinking back of like oh wow i've been here since a million subscribers like this happened so quickly but it doesn't feel like the journey is even close to over right i think a lot of this is like enjoying the journey you're on and so it's like jimmy and i probably don't reflect as much as we should on like accomplishments like him and i will give each other a high five or a fist bump and be like we want a kid's choice award or he won a kid's choice award congrats uh i haven't really thought about it too much because i think we just have so much more to accomplish this is like an amazing milestone but yeah it's i mean how do you wrap your head around 100 million people that's what i was saying i was like holding this thing and i was like will i ever see one of these again like a hundred million subscribers on a channel like this is crazy i don't know like will i ever see it again i have no idea but we have so much more to accomplish i don't know this is like if anything it fuels us to be like wow this is one of the goals we had when i met him in 2018 was to hit 100 million subscribers that goal's hit but we have so many other goals along the road that we have to get to that we kind of just like reset the focus and we're off so we we both worked in this world before it was called the creator economy and watched i guess over the last couple years you know this thing have a name to it and have this industry develop you know with this potential economic downturn coming like do you feel like there this will change like what what happens to this world of the creator economy in the future we've never been through a recession in the creator economy what youtube was launched in 2006 like the collapse was in 2007. i'm again i sent out a document like i don't even know two months ago a month ago that was basically like what should creators know and how should they be preparing for an eminent recession and so i i think that the biggest takeaway for me as i started having a lot of conversations was most creators just don't understand their business they don't understand how much it takes to post a video they don't understand how much they're paying people like what their cost structure is how much money they're making on a per month basis that's like first what needs to happen is like if you're a creator you really need to understand your business what's the like the fundamentals of what every creator should know about their business i think you should know one you should know how you make money i think that's really important after you know how you make money it's how much are you spending like what what are you actually spending money on i think even like looking around this place the amount of like equipment yeah and like there's lights on you're paying an electric bill you're paying obviously we probably have internet in here like all the things that you don't think about that you're paying for we got we got people over here we got someone taking a picture like there's like there's people everywhere right so there's there's costs like all i see is dollar signs like when i look around same i don't these people but most like most creators like don't know they have no idea they're like oh i just pay an editor twenty dollars to edit a video i'm like okay like do you pay for any software products like do you pay for um adobe like they like don't you don't think about these things and so after you understand where you're making money from it's understanding what those expenses are and then it's understanding like am i actually making money month over month or am i losing money did i have a really good july that's funding the rest of my year because i'm losing money for the next six months yeah i don't think most creators understand even what they're burning on a per month basis yeah because i think we end up developing recurring expenses but sometimes not recurring revenue because it's like some months are better than others you know and you actually start to recognize like wait there's not a there's not monthly recurring revenue in our business and so to try to find like how do you develop that you could develop that through long-term you know partnerships you could sign a year-long deal you can you know like there are ways to develop it but i do think that was one of the first lessons for us hard lessons for us was like not even knowing the ins and outs of our business like what's coming in and what's going out we also like have had so many creators that when you start making more money per month you start spending money on pretty ridiculous things like now you want a lamborghini and like now you buy it at home gym we bought a car they're like yeah exactly like you buy this office like you start spending a lot of money yeah and you're like okay now i'm making 20k a month but i just spent 25k because like i doubled my revenue i doubled my expenses right and so people just need to understand that has there been anything for you in the past two years where something you feel like uh has happened in the creator economy that you weren't expecting certain type of growth like i feel like these last two years have been super unique i didn't i'll be honest like i didn't expect tick-tock to blow up like it did i honestly thought tik-tok was just a trend that was going to just blow away and i was like the whole dancing thing is just not going to last i still have a lot of questions around community building around swipe content but yeah tick tock was not something that i saw coming i actually internally was kind of leading the charge around like we don't really want to represent tick tock creators like let's focus on where we think community is built and that's on youtube and so when everyone else was launching these management companies signing tick-tock creators and opening tick-tock houses you guys probably noticed like night's very quiet we didn't really sign any tick tock creators because we were like we would rather have mariah elizabeth sophia nygaard we'd rather have massive communities built on youtube than sign this like up and coming tick tock creator with 50 million followers that like may or may not grow a community and i think it's like proven now that i mean after vidcon vidcon was like crazy yeah that was eye-opening for me yeah walking into rooms where like a tick tock creator was speaking and it was half full i was like wow i didn't expect this like this person has 30 million tick tock followers but like can't fill a room of a thousand people yeah it was a kind of that's more like saturated that's more common now right like for someone to have you i think you just posted this right the amount of people who have a million subs on youtube yeah in america in america are those stuff in 2010 there was zero over ten thousand now there's what was it fifty five hundred and a month over a million over a million yeah right that's like that's super substantial when you think about then and i'm sure on tick tock that number is insane right oh i i couldn't even i don't even remember i don't even know the names of these tick tock channels there's like people with 50 million followers on tick tock and i i remember seeing their face scrolling through but i can't identify what the channel name is i think that's different on youtube right if someone has 50 million subs like i and i've watched two videos i remember the channel name yeah if i i could watch a tick tock um from someone i could watch 30 tick tocks from a tick tocker and i could not even remember their name because you're through it so quick you're like five seconds and you're gone on to the next you just don't even pay attention i think that's the difference is like it's so hard to build community on tick tock right now and it worries me for the you guys see this the people growing on youtube with youtube shorts i don't think they're growing fan bases i think people are just flicking through youtube shorts they're getting hundreds of millions of views a month but when they go to do something like even sell apparel like nobody wants it because they just haven't built a community whereas like dream and carl they were doing two hour live streams on twitch yeah and they were doing narrative based storytelling and they were communicating with people on twitter and read it it's just it's it's a different touch point and so it's like it's really hard for me to kind of wrap my head around like why would we represent a tick tock creator over a massive youtube channel yeah i wonder though just where it nets out for all of these short form creators that have grown so much i unfortunately think is if we're headed into an economic downturn like it's going to be really hard for them to make money i was like like that when i started talking about like are we heading into a recession it was really targeted at like short form content creators because i'm not worried about the carls and jimmy's and sapnaps who have like have diversified revenue streams and youtube channels and twitch streams i'm more worried for the tick tock creator who only can do brand deals there's no ad revenue on tick tock they maybe do like one brand deal a month they don't have a community where they can sell a substantial amount of apparel they aren't creating their own businesses that's who i'm worried for and that's like what i'm kind of seeing is like those brand deals are probably going to dry up and then how do they make money so i'm just worried that like all these long-form people stop posting content they're like i need to go figure out how to make money with my life because i have 30 million followers on tick tock but no one's paying for it anymore so that's like that it really worries me and i'm seeing it now being replicated on youtube with youtube shorts the amount of channels doing over 300 million views just on youtube shorts is wild at the moment and nobody knows who they are it's just crazy like every day i go on social blade i'm like who's in the top 100 viewed channels right now it's all shorts channels interesting it's crazy and but but no like people are paying attention because they're flicking through shorts but i don't think anyone really is paying attention to these people um i have one more uh mr beast video related question i watched the i didn't eat for 30 days video and it was actually my favorite video jimmy's ever made ever made ever made don't tell him that i will not i'm sure he won't the reason why is because i think it it was the first time i saw jimmy's character development play out in a youtube video he was the focus uh it was almost like a vlog which which felt so different from when he's the host and other people are doing things that are challenging uh and i know he's obviously done it and you know buried alive and whatnot but like there was something so relatable about not eating like i don't know what it's like to be buried alive i can't connect with his discomfort there to a certain level right i'm just like that looks different we still have the coffin if you want to choose no i don't want to try that that sounds unbelievably terrifying let's try it out next time not just an hour yeah i don't know anything i don't think i can do 15 minutes okay well let's not do it then okay let's do ten minutes for 15 minutes did you not like what did you think about that i just didn't want to be on set it made me incredibly nervous the buried alive yeah got it got it got it got it yeah that that to me like he he filmed a video early on where he tried to spend 12 hours underwater you guys probably said yeah that's an insane video yeah i won't even get into that but like that that to me was the reason why i didn't want to be on and i knew buried alive was much safer because of the protocols we took to film that video but yeah the underwater video made me so upset that like gave me a little bit of ptsd for very live but the the non-eating video and he had a good story around it too like he kept saying this to me like he was meeting some of these people that had crohn's and they they were doing these extended fasts and it was really helping with their crohn's and so he's like i want to test this theory do you think i should film it uh he ended up filming it i think it turned into a really interesting video and people do like watching jimmy i think for the most part early on in his career he was the director of his videos you probably noticed this like jimmy went through the evolution of like counting to a hundred thousand to like kind of being like the games master of the videos for sure and then it kind of came back around like him and i kind of realized like you need to be the center of attention for your videos and so he started doing like spent like i spent 24 hours in the coldest place in the world and like we we noticed that people really liked watching him either suffer or watching him be the main focal point of the video yeah and so i think that video did both like you got to watch jimmy really struck like struggle through something which is not eating but he also was the main storytelling line you also got to see behind the scenes of his life oh yeah yeah i traveled the whole time we were like yeah we went to new york for brand cast yes he had to go up with mark rober and give a speech this was like 10 days into fasting he was sleeping on the floor yeah he slept on the floor in his green room because he was so tired and so it's like i got to kind of that's why i thought that was one of the most unique videos and again for me like maybe it's not is all of his fans favorite video but for me personally i was like i don't i actually like i talked to jimmy i don't know what his life looks like that often right yeah and you got to see him do a video like through his life that was really interesting to me agreed were there any other videos that you were unsure of uh with him oh man there's a ton uh where do i start it's probably like a good sign yeah it's a good sign right yeah uh i mean unsure skeptical uh this isn't safe we probably shouldn't be filming it there's also a few videos like they thought that they could scale a wall with plungers early on and they built this giant plexiglas wall i was like this is the stupidest thing i've ever seen the video never got posted right there's one video this man this video is such a banger too they traveled to the like all seven wonders of the world so they basically had they like drew straws and it was like or something and and it's like i got pyramids of giza and stonehedge and like everyone got a different location and they all left at the same time and went to the seven wonders of the world it never got posted because they could never figure out what the thumbnail was for this video wow i kid you not everything filmed jimmy lost his camera in rome which was problem number one and then no thumbnail got taken and so it's like video never got posted so there's a lot of those stories where there's just videos in the graveyard and there's tons of videos in the graveyard does that ever frustrate you as a manager or yeah do you just understand it yeah because we've had brand deals on a lot of these videos and then i have to call x brand who is like i love that video concept be like yeah it's not happening jimmy doesn't know what a the thumbnail is for this video and for a brand that's like what are you talking about yeah they do not understand it yeah they're like wait so jimmy doesn't like the edit but you re-edited it and you still didn't post it and you're not gonna post it i'm like yeah he doesn't like it it's getting thrown in the garbage but they're like but you spent x amount of money on this video i'm like that's that's irrelevant it doesn't matter because like he doesn't think the video is a good video thus it's not getting posted so there's a lot there's a lot of he sends out the i think he does videos now every year he's like these videos didn't get posted yeah there's still a lot of videos that are in the graveyard that haven't made that cut he like built a city out of bouncy castles such a stupid video never got posted [Laughter] do you think there's like do you think there's dangers we've talked about this with actually a few different craters but i'm curious your perspective on the impact or dangers of younger creators try striving to be like jimmy yeah it's just going to be really hard for someone to catch up to where he's currently at because he's spending so much money and the ideas have gotten so crazy and his team's gotten so big like it's a massive infrastructure someone's going to do it it'd be dumb for us to say someone's not going to like do that blueprint and pull it off but i do see a lot of creators who are making mr b style videos but they just can't get up to that caliber because they're not able to spend a million dollars on a video but i i do appreciate that people are striving to make better videos like we're seeing it all over youtube i think what's interesting is a lot of people have realized they can't come up to jimmy's bar so they've been like i'm just going to be way more creative and i think ryan trehan is a great example of like he doesn't want to make videos at that scale but he's just really focused on like what's the most creative things that i can do that people want to watch and he's had so much success doing that i think like arach's another good example like just creatively his videos are really good and he doesn't have to spend a million dollars a video to pull some of these off like he just is thinking a lot about like is this a good concept are people gonna click let's go execute it and so youtube is in a bit of a weird spot right now i don't think there's a lot of creativity but i do think that there's a handful of creators that i look at every single day and i'm like wow like that is an amazing video and idea that like i can't believe they executed when you're looking at craters to bring on what are the characteristics that they need to have because i'm sure you see a lot of creators with great videos yeah all day all day but top secret checklist yeah yeah i don't think okay yeah he's got a top secret when i like retire i will tell people what it is but yeah i haven't really publicly spoken about it i think it's one of the secret sauces of our company when you look at our roster top to bottom we have a lot of creators who have like hockey stick growth and they're killing it and you know i came up with these five things four years ago of like what is a night creator and i spent a lot of time actually with ezra on a whiteboard of like if we're gonna go forward as a digital talent management company we need to understand what this person looks like what is the makeup of this person and so there's a lot of effort put into that and we don't deviate from it it's like if they don't check every single like thing that we need them to check they're not a night media creator and that's fine they're just not for us uh and so i don't know if i'll ever release that but we'll see i like it i think it has a future yeah it's got good allure around it it's like yeah yeah i like it and again we from top to bottom like i think people can look at our roster it's like well diversified we're in almost every single content niche now from like you know food with googa and matt stoney all the way to life and beauty with sophia nygaard like we're on every spectrum and a lot of those people are the number one number two or number three channel in their specific content niche and so there's just like certain characteristics that i look for and certain things that we identify and we're like okay this person's perfect when you look back at this journey up to this point like you look at the success you've had is it like what does it feel like the journey from starting it to here yeah feels like we haven't even got started i mean my vision for this company is so much bigger than what it currently is uh and and the the business plan and the vision that we put in place four years ago it's just like we have a long ways to go like i honestly like wanna i i think there's gonna be a fundamental shift in how representation works and the type of talent and just how everything is becoming direct to consumer and so we have our philosophies around how that's going to change and like how the agencies are going to have to adapt and so we think and this is the interesting thing with us is like we think over like decades like we're making long-term decisions i think most people are like in the day-to-day of management and they're like we eventually just want to sell this business no i want to compete with wme and ca and uta like and it's going to take decades and so a lot of the decisions we make are like with that outlook of like this is going to take a long time but i've taken a lot of inspiration from people like ari emanuel and like what they've built over decades of of talent representation and building media companies and like that's what we're striving for it's not necessarily just like let's just manage creators like there's a much bigger vision that we put in place and yeah i feel like we're in inning two maybe inning one of that vision and it's going to take us a lot longer to get there that's a great place to to stop well thanks guys thank you very much for coming yeah thanks for coming over man [Music] you

Channel: Colin and Samir

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Keywords: colin and samir, Colin and Samir Videos, colin and samir show, Amazon FBA, Robinhood Stocks, Making money online, how much money on youtube, mrbeast, interview, podcast, youtubers, business, creator economics, I Gave My 100000000th Subscriber An Island, Giving School Supplies To The Poorest Schools In America, Would You Swim With Sharks For $100000?, How Mr Beast Built His Buiness Empire (1$ Billion on youtube?), Mr Beast new video, paddy galloway, billionaire, how much does mr beast

Id: N5YW4JB07-8

Length: 47min 57sec (2877 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 15 2022