Brianna Lewis yearned for a creative career, but was at a loss of where to start or what role might be the best fit. That was until late 2021, when a family member sent her Kai Cenat’s Instagram story.
Cenat, who is a top Twitch streamer and YouTube creator with millions of subscribers across multiple platforms, was looking for an assistant.
“I didn’t even follow him, or know who he was,” Lewis said. “I was in between jobs, so I reached out to him through Instagram DMs, and told him a little bit about myself.”
Cenat responded to her message, writing that she could have the job if she could get one task done.
The task: Cenat was turning his house into a petting zoo and needed a zebra.
“I wasn’t expecting that at all,” said Lewis, now 28. “We were talking on a Friday, and I asked, ‘When do you need this by?’ He said Monday. I was like, ‘Oh, shit!’ But you know, we got it done.”
Lewis said she called zoo after zoo in Georgia, to no avail, until she found a “mobile petting zoo” that happened to have a baby zebra available for hire.
“They weren’t even available for the date I needed, but I begged them to do it, and they eventually agreed,” she said. “If they had said no, I probably wouldn’t be here today.”
After passing that initial test, Lewis decided to take a chance on Cenat’s offer, and moved from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Atlanta, Georgia, to live closer to him. She’s worked for him ever since.
Like Cenat, many of YouTube’s top creators have evolved from solo ventures into full-fledged media companies with warehouse space, LLCs, and employees.
While Cenat keeps his team lean, other YouTubers employ hundreds of people. Jimmy Donaldson, known as MrBeast, has an operation of roughly 250 employees, a spokesperson told Insider. Preston Arsement, who runs the YouTube company TBNR, had over 100 employees as of July.
Research by Oxford Economics estimated that, in 2022, YouTube’s creative ecosystem contributed over $35 billion to the US GDP and supported more than 390,000 full-time equivalent US jobs.
This new job market has created dozens of careers, ranging from content strategist to thumbnail designer and video-retention specialist. There’s even a job board dedicated to finding work with a YouTube creator: YT Jobs. Currently, the site lists job openings with salaries as high as $130,000.
To get a sense of what these roles entail, Insider spoke with 17 current or former employees of top YouTube media companies, including Cenat as well as MrBeast, TBNR, Dude Perfect, and more. Some requested anonymity to protect business relationships. Their identities are known to Insider.
The staffers ranged from full-time employees to contractors, and they described days filled with unimaginable stunts, inconsistent work hours, varying salaries, and frequent pivoting. Despite the downsides, many of them said that working with an internet star had been the job of a lifetime.
“It’s 100% addictive to live that life,” said Britt Carter, who worked as a creative producer for MrBeast for six months. “You’d have days where everything was going wrong, working so hard and physically killing yourself to make something happen. But then, the next day, you’d pull off these incredible stunts and pieces of content, and you were on such a high that it makes you forget all those hard hours and days.”
Crashing trains, an Orbeez-filled pool, and the biggest burger in the world
Carter said that during her time with MrBeast’s company, she became used to being pulled into sudden, wild stunts. One day in October 2022, she was having lunch with her parents in Greenville, North Carolina, when she got a call from her manager.
“Hey, don’t come back to the office,” she recalled her manager saying. “Go home, grab a bag. I need you to drive to the Great Smoky Mountains.” Her manager explained that their next project would entail crashing trains from the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad into brick walls.
Carter got in her car and drove six hours across the state to meet her team. That video, which includes a variety of stunts — such as flattening a Lamborghini with a hydraulic press — now has over 200 million views.
“You had to be prepared for anything,” Carter said. “It was an all-hands-on-deck-all-the-time kind of thing.”
Beyond crashing trains, she also helped out with making the world’s biggest burger, and filling a pool with one billion Orbeez.
In the fast-paced world of mind-boggling YouTube stunts — a phenomenon that has previously been dubbed the “MrBeast-ification of YouTube” — employees can find themselves fulfilling outlandish tasks like these.
Working with a top YouTuber can also be a strange mix of mingling with famous stars and struggling to explain your job to your family.
Cenat, for instance, has worked with dozens of celebrities.
“It’s always a little bit of a surreal moment like, ‘Wow! How did I end up here?'” Lewis said. “I’m standing in the room with Ice Spice? Or I’m standing in a room with Drake? This is crazy.”
But for a while, Lewis said her family couldn’t quite wrap their heads around what she did for work. That was until Cenat began to acquire more fame on and offline.
“Now, all of a sudden, my family is reaching out to me asking for his autograph,” Lewis said.
An ever-changing industry, where hours and pay vary widely
While the influencer industry at large continues to mature, it’s still often filled with loose job titles, chaotic hours, and changing pay standards.
“No two days are ever the same,” Lewis said. Some days, for instance, she’ll be responding to emails, negotiating deals, or hiring new team members.
“I wear so many hats, and I think that’s important that you have to be versatile to be in this space and in this position,” Lewis said. “We plan out content together, we bounce ideas off of each other. The creative aspect of my job is the part that I like the most.”
“But also, no task is too small, either,” she added. “If he needs me to go get him a coffee, yeah, I’m going to do that, too.”
A lot of the excitement comes from the feeling of pushing the boundaries of creativity, and of being able to witness the impact of the work — whether it be editing, writing a script, or coming up with a video idea that will go on to amass hundreds of millions of views.
“They will do everything and anything to get it done,” said a MrBeast producer who worked on planning a Japan trip for a video, which included driving karts in the streets of Tokyo. “They don’t take no for an answer.”
“The stuff I was able to negotiate for them in Japan, in such a short period of time, in a country that has a lot of rules working against them, was insane,” this person said. “A lot of doors open up when you have that attitude.”
But the pursuit of views can also mean working long hours, sometimes sacrificing weekends or pulling all-nighters to meet a deadline. Peter Sanjur, who worked for two years with the YouTube group Dude Perfect in various roles, said his schedule varied widely, sometimes with 50- or 60-hour weeks — especially when he was tasked with building props and sets for videos.
Sanjur recalled a time when he “worked through the night” with two other staffers to finish painting and designing sets for a video on model rockets.
“Most of the time it was not like that,” he added of working through the night. “It was only on a few occasions that would ever happen. When I was working there, they were really lenient. If we put in a lot of hours one week, and we had some free time next week, they said, ‘Hey, just take a day off.'”
Sanjur said he didn’t mind the long hours.
But for others who worked for big YouTubers, the commitment of time and emotion just wasn’t worth it.
At least five of the staffers Insider spoke with said they quit their jobs because they felt their mental health was deteriorating, and three said they were not being compensated for the overtime they were putting in. Most of those people moved into traditional entertainment roles or started their own freelance business.
“I essentially had no social life. I was sacrificing personal life elements that I now cherish,” said one former employee of a large YouTube-focused company. “At that point, I was 20. I felt like I needed to rethink my values in life. And spending 24/7 on the company was killing my mental health.”
‘It’s a labor of love’
Many of the staffers said their personal lives had intertwined with work, and the boundaries between the two had gotten blurred. That could be both a good and bad thing — it often provided a deep connection to the work, but also make it hard to log off.
Zi Yuan, who worked for eight months with a top finance creator, said working with a small team that was in touch 24/7 made her colleagues and the talent feel like family.
“You’re so emotionally invested in the company’s growth,” Yuan said. “Whereas, if it’s a corporate job, you can just go, ‘Okay, signing off, I’ll deal with it on Monday.'”
Jason Russak, the COO of the company behind YouTuber Jesse Riedel, also known as Jesser, is a lifelong friend of the creator and lives in a house with him, together with the company’s executive producer and Riedel’s girlfriend. Russak said keeping work and life separate isn’t easy, but the team has been making an effort to not use the house as an office — although they still shoot some content there.
“I tend to work seven days a week, but it’s a labor of love,” Russak said. “It’s like the old adage of, ‘If you love what you do, you never work a day in your life.'”
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