MrBeast makes $250k on X, Using ViewStats, and How to avoid the fate of legacy media

0:00Did you know that Mr. Beast made 250 grand on X? I did. Yeah? What did you think about that? I don't know how it actually worked on X's end, but my theory is because it's Mr. Beast and they want to entice more people like Mr. Beast who have a massive social following to post more video content, his content was going to do better and perform better from a revenue standpoint than most people's. And then the other thing to keep in mind is even though he produced 250 ,000, the video he used was one of his good videos, right? Because not all his videos, they all do well, but some do much better than others.

0:40And the other factor is he spends an arm and a leg to create his content. Most people don't spend that much money. And if you look at how much he generates in ads versus how much he's spending, I bet you he's losing money if it was just a straight monetization play. so yeah i'm looking at this tweet over here so my first x video made over 250k it's a bit of a facade advertiser saw the attention it was getting and bought ads on my video i think at thus my revenue per view is probably higher than what you experienced so it got 156 million impressions 5.1 million engagements and then 263k in revenue and then he gave it all away and then i think he he tweeted afterwards and it became a super viral tweet saying he gave 25 grand 10 times if they follow or like re-engage or like retweet.

1:24And I think that got like hundreds of millions of views or something like that. So he like leveraged the attention to get more attention. I think that was smart of him. And hey, 250 grand is better than nothing. And he already had that video on YouTube and any other social channel that he probably uses, which I'm assuming is all of them. But it's a smart model. If you're creating content, I don't get why people don't just post it on all platforms. It's like extra reach. And dude, I know people who post on Twitter. We have mutual friends. Some of them get no likes. Yeah. And it's like, it's okay.

1:56It's you're still getting some impressions. It's better than nothing. You know, don't be ashamed of having little to no engagement. It's better than nothing. I'll tell you what. I mean, you know, I'll tell you what's good for Mr. Beast. What he should do, I believe, is, you know, he has a SaaS called ViewStats. Okay. He has a what? A SaaS. Software as a service, you know. Okay. Yeah. So, so ViewStats, go to ViewStats.com. and it's like social blade, but it's better. And so the cool thing, you should definitely have your team do this, but you can see the videos. You can see videos on my page and you can see how many times I've ran tests on each particular video.

2:32When I started doing the AB test, when I started doing a thumbnail test, how many I've ran. And so now we have something where we can hold our people accountable to. We can see how many tests they're running because we want them to run a lot of tests, right? And I just think the analytics are better. He's not charging anything for this right now. and I think it's one of the better YouTube tools that are out there. And maybe he'll start charging five bucks a month or 10 bucks a month. Oh no, no, no, check it out. Yeah. By the way, Neil and I have an agency owners group called the Agency Owners Association.

2:59All you have to do, just go to marketingschool.io slash agency. Once again, it's marketingschool.io slash agency to learn more. And now back to the show. On a side note, going back to YouTube and even X and Mr. Beast and just social in general. Dude, it was funny. Did you see the chart that someone ended up posting on Reddit? Netflix's revenue per user versus Facebook? No. What is it? I believe it was$194 per year per user. Facebook,$207 per user per year. Wow. Wow. And it's so funny because everyone talks about, hey, you need to have these cool, you know, hit businesses. You want to charge for subscriptions and everyone's like subscription businesses are better.

3:50Ad businesses are ugly. You see all these ads out there. No one wants them on the platform. But at the end of the day, you know, money's money. And you and I have been in business long enough. Just look at the companies that you talked about in your retreat. one was a quilt business one is a phone service one buys wordpress plugins one's one's a pet insurance or pet industry one focuses on debt one focuses on debt like a cap chase no no no they uh sorry it's pay for performance for debt okay yeah uh another one focuses on analytics for sass but he sold that company right yeah patrick yeah none of the companies and i'm not trying to belittle any of these people, I'm in the same boat.

4:31None of these people have sexy companies. No, I don't have a sexy company. You don't have a sexy company. The riches are an ugly. Hey, that's a good clip. No, the riches really are an ugly. Microsoft is not a sexy company. Yes. Apple is a sexy company, but if you look at a lot of the large corporations out there, Facebook is not sexy. Microsoft is not sexy. Google is not sexy. Amazon is not sexy, right? Sexy is like Louis Vuitton. Yeah. Sexy is like Coca-Cola or Airbnb or like consumer stuff. Everyone's like, wow, that's so cool. Like Tesla to me is sexy. Yes, there is money in Tesla. And even LVMH, I think he is currently the richest person or the second richest, depending on the day.

5:15And also, who knows if Elon gets that$55 billion payout, you know? Yeah, that'll affect his network. But however you look at it, yes, there are people who make a lot of money doing sexy businesses. But if Eric and I look at our network, most of the people we know and most of the other entrepreneurs, you know, in our circles or even outside of our circles that we've talked to, most of them have made their money from ugly businesses. Usually it's one thing. Yeah, it's one thing. You know, I know someone in YPO that just manufactures product for one of the biggest apparel companies and they generate over a billion dollars.

5:50How ridiculous is that? Just do one thing for one corporation. Your margins aren't going to be the highest because they're going to squeeze you because it's so much money, but you're still making tens and tens of millions of dollars a year in profit. It's not sexy, but it still prints cash. You know, it's funny. We look at Twitter now, or I look at Twitter and it's like, you see the same mistakes happening over and over. So you learned your lesson. You know, I learned my lesson. So we got punched in the face before to focus, right? And then to do one thing for a very long time. And then you see people that are just super smart and they talk about their holding company or the 10 different things that they're doing.

6:20Or like, you know, I just started this company over here and it's a completely unrelated business. But then they're also making fun of people that are telling them to focus. And it's just like, dude, it's like you look at it, it's like you're waiting for this train to crash, basically. So I don't know. It's just, you see the same thing over and over. We're just telling you guys, those of you that are doing multiple things, probably should just do one thing. Focus is so important. We've talked about this in the past, but Warren Buffett and Bill Gates got asked a question on what do you think is one of the most important factors that have led you to your success?

6:51It was something like that. I'm paraphrasing. They both wrote on a piece of paper without talking to each other. It was at the same time, I believe, and they both wrote down focus. Focus is super important. And everyone looks at, you know, I was talking to someone the other day and they're like, you know what? I think the new thing is not focus. If you look at a lot of people like Elon Musk and stuff like that, they're doing a lot of things at once. I was like, who told me? You told me about this. I told you that. And I was at dinner and I respect the person who ended up telling me he's really smart.

7:19We both know him, mutual friend of ours. I agree with that if you're Elon Musk. Most of us are not Elon Musk. For most people, 99.99 % of the population out there, you need a focus. There's not enough time in the day to build a massive company. Elon is able to do it. Most people don't. And I think it's one because he's extremely brilliant, but I also do believe there is some luck on his side as well. There was a VC named Guy Kawasaki. And Guy Kawasaki wrote a book called - Is he a VC? He used to be. Yeah. Is he? He was an Apple's evangelist. Then he had Garage Ventures, which is his venture fund.

7:57Oh, I didn't know that. He had it for a long time. And then from there, he became a evangelist for Canva. He's done well in his life. but when you look at guy in his book art of the start you know he talks about in life if he could pick he rather invest in luck because if you look at a lot of the business that have done well a lot of things you can't control like if you look at youtube was it uh vimeo that or vo that got bloody and went out there and fought all the battles with video being online was it vimeo a vo i think it was one of those video platforms yeah that got bloody before you and they paved the way for YouTube.

8:32Yeah. Right. It wasn't that YouTube had a better idea. Someone else got bloody before I'm dealing with laws and regulations, which also helped pave the way for YouTube. And just go the YouTube acquisition by Google was, it was lucky too, because YouTube couldn't support all the server costs and everything, dude. And it was so expensive. They paid, what is it? 1.8 billion. I haven't seen in a long time. 1.1 or something. No, I think it was higher than that. I thought it was 1.8. It was something ridiculous. Let me just type it in. YouTube acquisition, YouTube, Google buys. 1.65, you're closer. 1.65.

9:03Either way, that's a ton of money. And everyone back then thought they overpaid for Google or for YouTube. And now look at it. It's worth over$100 billion in Google stock. They're laughing to the bank. That was one of the best acquisitions they made. I consider that luck. If you look at the Instagram acquisition by Facebook, part of it was luck. I think the Instagram founders really kicked themselves for selling out. Now that thing would have been worth over$100 billion itself. Who knows? I mean, you know, I would say afterwards, Google really improved. Without Google's like product updates to YouTube, it wouldn't have gone where it went.

9:38And then I know when Instagram sold a lot on a couple of people, but actually this actually parlays into this tweet over here. I don't know if you saw this. Have you seen this graph before? So this graph here, I'll read it out. And those of you that can't see the screen. It's a newspaper advertising. And then is it adjusted with inflation? Yeah. Well, billions of dollars not adjusted for inflation. But you can see there's a blue line over here, which shows the app, the newsletter industry. Show it to the camera. Yeah. Newsletter industry over here going to 67 billion or so. And then all of a sudden in the 2000s, Google comes out of nowhere.

10:08And then Google is like this pink line. It just shoots up. And you see all these other advertising platforms shooting up. But the newsletter platform or newsletter industry just goes down. Newspaper industry. Sorry. John Clearer. Newspaper. Yeah. The blue line just goes completely down. Right. So basically it's, it's when legacy. So here's the tweet from Balaji. So Balaji says, it's when we now understand the 2010s. It's when legacy media fought a ferocious but ultimately doomed rear guard campaign against the internet. That's why they pushed censorship so hard and constantly thumped their chest about being journalists.

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12:22No issues with versions or miscommunication. Whether you're starting from scratch or using one of their templates, Framer lets you focus on design while handling the technical side for you. Animations, responsive layouts, search optimization, and all the things that matter. Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded without hiring a developer? Launch your site for free at framer.com and use code MS to get your first month of pro on the house. That's framer.com, promo code MS, framer.com, promo code MS. Rules and restrictions may apply. So it's interesting because the other thing is you can see the thousands, hundreds of thousands of newspaper employees.

12:58It just goes straight down. And you hear all these layoffs that are happening. It sucks that people are getting laid off. That sucks. But like this kind of goes into what you're just saying. It's like, why do people buy Instagram? Why do people buy WhatsApp? Why do people buy YouTube? It's because of the attention. That's where the money is. And look at Facebook, making$207 per user over Netflix is 194. And what is Netflix doing now? Introducing ads. What did Amazon do? Introducing ads. Dude, I met up with a guy at Amazon. I forgot what conference. It was somewhere in Utah. It was for an e-commerce conference.

13:26And he's wanting to sit down and he's one of their spokespersons, deal with their whole ad platform. He's like, Neil, if you want to put this bottle of water in one of the shows that we make, we can switch it out for X amount of impressions. And then if you want to change your shoes on the person, we can change your shoes. We can adjust placements of different products for shows and movies that we produce. And you can actually have ads integrated into the media. We didn't get under pricing. He was pitching it to me to pitch to all of our customers. Got it. Got it. Well, and by the way, I mean, this could be the thing we could wrap up on.

13:58Talking about changing things up, AR and VR. You tweeted about your Apple Vision Pro experience. Dude, the Apple Vision Pro. I have another one in my unit. I got two. I thought you're returning it. Yeah, I did return the first one. so you still have one i gotta return the second one too okay i ordered it literally at like 502 or 503 or something like that in the morning the day it first came out and then i found that i was gonna get it like four or five days later so i'm like screw this i went to apple and i bought one i told the lady she just returned the other one yeah so then i bought it put it on thing was amazing technology wise i think it is the future there's not enough essential apps on there it's too heavy and it gives you a headache if you at least have contacts.

14:39My, I have LASIK, so I don't have prescription lenses, but you know that feeling if you wear contacts or glasses for the very first time, it gives you a headache for a bit. It hurts. Yes. You get the same feeling when you end up doing it the other way around. Yeah. So anyway, I mean, you, you said it's good. You think it's going to be game changing. Andrew Wilkinson tweeted something. He said he thinks it's going to be game changing or sorry. No, he thinks it's a novelty. So it's kind of like how you think about right now. It's more of a novelty than anything. Austin Reif of Morning Brew, he thinks it's going to be game-changing technology.

15:11So we'll see where it's going to go. I'm the type with this type of stuff. I'm usually an early adopter, but I'm going to wait for like one iteration or two. I've been waiting on iterations for Apple Watch for a while. I still don't have one right now because I just don't like wearing things. But anyway, that's that for this episode. Please don't forget to rate, if you subscribe and we'll see you tomorrow.