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MrBeast made over $263,000 in ad revenue from posting his latest video on X, but the YouTube icon says he thinks this number is “a bit of a facade.”
“Advertisers saw the attention it was getting and bought ads on my video (I think) and thus my revenue per view is prob higher than what you’d experience,” MrBeast said in a tweet X post.
MY FIRST X VIDEO MADE OVER $250,000! 😲
But it’s a bit of a facade. Advertisers saw the attention it was getting and bought ads on my video (I think) and thus my revenue per view is prob higher than what you’d experience pic.twitter.com/nViVpZbWBb
— MrBeast (@MrBeast) January 22, 2024
Since taking over Twitter (now X), Elon Musk has tried to lure creators to the platform with new ways to earn money, like earning a share of ad revenue from their posts. And perhaps the best thing Musk could to do get creators to take the platform seriously is to woo internet megastar MrBeast, who has more subscribers than any other individual on YouTube.
Luckily for Musk, MrBeast is a fan of his — but, business comes first. When Musk (sort of?) asked the 25-year-old creator to post his videos on X, he replied, “My videos cost millions to make and even if they got a billion views on X it wouldn’t fund a fraction of it […] I’m down though to test stuff once monetization is really cranking!”
Apparently, monetization is “really cranking” now, because MrBeast posted a 16 minute video last week, saying he was “curious how much ad revenue a video on X would make.”
After a week, MrBeast shared a screenshot showing that the video got over 156 million impressions, 5 million engagements, and $263,655 in ad revenue.
Throughout MrBeast’s test, though, some users raised concern that the video was being treated by X as though it were an advertisement, which could possibly juice engagement. Maybe that’s what the YouTuber means when he calls his monetization success “a facade.”
this has shown up in my feed maybe 7 times now
it is both missing the post time next to the username (indicative of a normal user post) and the Ad indicator on the top right
so is there a third, secret type of post you get when you’re a YouTuber and Elon wants you to post here? pic.twitter.com/ESNKognTuk
— █̶̳̘͛̄̃͒̄̃͜█̴͇̱̅͒̅█̵̻̣̝͒̈̄̈͝͝█̴̞̜̻̝͍̂̽͜█̷̢ (@SHL0MS) January 19, 2024
TechCrunch reported in September that X was running unlabeled ads in users’ feeds; then, an ads watchdog filed a complaint with the FTC over the ongoing, unlabeled ads issue. Ryan Broderick hypothesized that videos might be wrongly labeled as ads if a pre-roll ad plays before the video, but this still causes a lot of confusion on the user end. A representative from X did not respond for comment.
