New Media Meets New Media

Today, the world's most-listened to podcast, the Joe Rogan Experience, interview the world's most-watched YouTuber, Mr.Beast. It was an eye-opening 2.5 hr conversation that touched on Mr.Beast's background and businesses, comparisons to Rogan's experience as the host of Fear Factor, and much about Mr. Beast's daily routines and vision for the future. Much of the conversation touched on Mr.Beast's relationship with Youtube, which he credits for his enormous success. Mr. Beast is only 23 years old but has been doing this for over a decade. It was fascinating to hear Mr.Beast's obsession with the platform, and the hundreds if not thousands of hours he spent studying and testing viral videos and honing his craft. The success that Mr.Beast has found was no accident. Rogan and Mr. Beast had an interesting discussion about whether Mr.Beast would consider taking his content off YouTube and moving to his own platform. It was a loaded question for Rogan who's famous $200M deal with Spotify made the platform his exclusive distributor. Mr. Beast laughed and asked why would he destroy his entire user base. Yes, he would be able to keep 100% of the ad revenue that he generates from his videos, but predicts he'd suffer greatly in terms of gaining new users. He estimated that he got 10-20M new subscribers last year, but if he had his own platform, it'd probably be 10% of that. Mr. Beast attributes this introduction to new subscribers to YouTube and the other products in the Alphabet ecosystem.  So for now, Mr. Beast is staying loyal to YouTube and taking his share of the ad revenue, and though Rogan admits he's still a big fan of YouTube, I'm sure the $200M in his bank account provides all the reassurance he needs. Only time will tell which approach will become more commonplace but one thing is certain: these two wildly popular, successful stars are pioneering new forms of media and testing ad-generated business models that come with them.