How the creator economy destroyed the Internet?

CimmyJimmy Donaldson, known as MrBeast, has the most popular YouTube account with more than 450 million subscribers, or just over 1 in 16 people in the world. His success with high-production, action videos has made him an aspirational role model for independent content creators everywhere: fulfilling the promise that, thanks to the Internet, gatekeepers no longer stand in the way of viral fame and the riches that supposedly come with it.

Some might say that the extraordinarily popular creators at the top are the exception that proves the rule, but even Donaldson, no matter how amazing he is at algorithms, can’t actually make money from YouTube. Financial documents reveal that the content arm of the MrBeast empire is a massive money loser — three straight years in the red, including a whopping negative $110 million in 2024. In fact, today, all these viral videos are just a marketing front for MrBeast’s real business: a line of humble chocolate bars, available at your local Walmart. If the dream is that content creators are supposed to invent a new way to make money, the reality is that they are relying on the oldest method: selling to millions of people who don’t need it.

In this series, Edge Dives into the ever-changing incentives that fuel the content machine across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. There was a time when the Internet wasn’t constantly trying to sell us stuff. But now, what was previously limited to the big trading giants has transcended every nook and corner of the Internet. It’s eating the Internet, swallowing the web whole and all of us with it. Maybe that’s why MrBeast’s mouth is always wide open.