MrBeast Grills X Promotion After Making $250k in One Week from Video Upload

After a tension-filled week filled with questions about X’s controversial content recommendation processes, and its decisions to boost specific videos to benefit its bottom line, YouTube sensation MrBeast has provided some eye-opening insight into how much he raked in from his first video upload in the app, including full view count data, in contrast to X’s public-facing “Views” stat.

MY FIRST X VIDEO MADE OVER $250,000! ????

But behind the numbers lies an interesting story. Advertisers took notice and bought ads for my video (I think) and that’s probably why my revenue per view is likely higher than what most people would typically experience pic.com/nViVpZbWBb

— MrBeast (@MrBeast) January 22, 2024

So MrBeast, also known as Jimmy Donaldson, took home $260k in one week. Not a bad payday for a three-month-old video upload from his YouTube channel, and most likely enough to convince Donaldson to give X another shot by using the same process.

Although the statistics are likely skewed, as Donaldson rightfully points out. $260,000 for essentially 5 million views is noteworthy, but a significant portion of that is due to direct sponsorship of the video, which has been a matter of dispute among X users who claim that the platform has also been boosting the video as an ad, without disclosing such actions.

For its part, X states that it hasn’t been artificially amplifying the clip, but the likelihood of other creators achieving similar results are pretty slim, and it does seem that MrBeast’s specific attention to this matter has influenced the outcome.

What makes evaluating the true effectiveness of X’s video monetization process difficult is the imbalance in engagement counts, as opposed to the public “View” figure highlighted on the post.

On Saturday, both X engineer Christopher Stanley and owner Elon Musk re-shared this post, indicating that MrBeast’s video garnered over 129 million views in just three days on the app.

YouTube also counts views from logged out users and replays. Currently, you have to be a logged in user for views to count on X. So the reach here is actually larger. https://t.co/JPedLVtAgr

— Christopher Stanley (@cstanley) January 19, 2024

As indicated in the stats that Donaldson has shared, those “views” are actually impressions, meaning the number of times the video appeared in user feeds. Of the 156 million impressions, only 5 million users actually interacted with the video. These don’t count as views, but rather people who clicked on the post or engaged with it.

That’s a significant difference between what X is publicly presenting as video “views” and the actual engagement levels. A 96% difference to be precise.

So while the actual monetization element has seemingly been swayed by the wide attention surrounding Donaldson’s first app upload, one thing is clear – X’s view counts are not a true reflection of actual views,

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