One fall day in 2022, Britt Carter was having lunch with her parents in Greenville, North Carolina, when she suddenly received 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 video would entail filming retired trains from the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad crashing into brick walls.
Carter, who was unfazed by the request, got into her car and drove six hours across the state to meet her team.
At the time, Carter was working as a creative producer for MrBeast, one of the most-subscribed creators on YouTube, and that video, which also included experiments like destroying a Lamborghini with a hydraulic press and filling a pool with one billion Orbeez, 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.”
Like MrBeast, many of YouTube’s top creators have evolved beyond sitting in front of a camera and using iMovie to film and upload clips toward full-fledged media companies.
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.
MrBeast is likely the most impressive example of this, with a company that counts about 250 employees and an estimated gross revenue of $82 million between June 2022 and June 2023, according to Forbes. The MrBeast job board usually has openings that range from hyper-specific roles like “thumbnail designer” — the person in charge of designing the small image that previews the content of a YouTube video, next to its title — to simply “creative.”
Insider spoke with 17 current and former employees of top YouTube stars, five of whom had worked for MrBeast. They described days filled with unimaginable stunts, inconsistent work hours, and varying salaries. For many of them, it was also the job of a lifetime.
“You’d have days where everything was going wrong, working so hard and physically killing yourself to make something happen,” Carter said about her role working for MrBeast, where she remained for six months. “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.”
The ‘MrBeast-ification of YouTube’
MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, has popularized a type of content that focuses on mind-boggling stunts and challenges — sometimes with thousands of dollars in cash prizes — creating a phenomenon that a fellow YouTuber has dubbed the “MrBeast-ification of YouTube.”
Donaldson has become a fixture in Greenville, the town where he grew up and now operates his company. Many of his employees work on site to participate in video production. The company owns five homes in one neighborhood that houses Donaldson’s friends and employees, The Washington Post reported this month.
Of the five former employees Insider spoke with, three had been asked to transfer to Greenville to work on site, while two of them were able to work remotely. Two of the on-site employees said housing was provided to them by the company.
Marc Kaplan, one of the remote employees, who was at the company for seven months as a production coordinator, said he rarely worked over the standard nine-to-five hours. But others, like Carter, found themselves staying at work much longer than 40 hours per week.
“It’s 100% addictive to live that life,” she said.
Carter described other wild tasks she was assigned, like one time when Donaldson wanted a circus tent that was branded in pink and blue, the MrBeast colors, for a video.
“He had seen a photo online of this circus tent that he loved the look of,” she said. “We were at a point in the concept that we did not have enough time to order one to be made to those specifications. So instead, my task became to figure out who owned that tent, figure out where that specific tent was, and go buy that tent from them.”
The employees Insider spoke with said working at MrBeast meant pushing the boundaries of what a YouTube video could achieve. Donaldson is known for scrapping videos, regardless of the time and money they took to make, if he’s unsatisfied with them.
“Everybody knew that the mission of the company was to create the best possible video. That came before everything else,” Carter said. “That was always the goal. If there was something that could make the video better, you would always defer to what could create the better content.”
Another former employee who worked for MrBeast as a producer said they had to negotiate with the Japanese government to give them permission to film around the famous Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo, for a video where Donaldson and his friends would be driving go-karts around the streets of the Japanese capital.
“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.”
Read more about what it’s like to work for top YouTube creators:
Find me a zebra and you can have the job: What it’s like to work for top YouTube stars, according to 17 current and former staffers of creators like MrBeast and Kai Cenat
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