Mr. Beast is probably the biggest channel on YouTube right now by a lot of metrics. But it wasn't always that way. He, like all YouTubers, started out making small videos from his bedroom playing video games or doing random challenges by himself. And like many YouTubers, once he started getting some traction, he was given sponsorship opportunities.

These days, his videos cost millions to sponsor and produce, but back in the day he would make do with a "lowly" $10,000 sponsorship. Those sponsors must have gotten a good deal. But how good a deal? And where are they now? In this post, we look through some of Mr. Beast's old sponsors and figure out how much value they got out of their sponsorship and what their company is up to today.

Quidd

It's hard to talk about Mr. Beast without talking about Quidd. They were the first company to take a chance on him and they've definitely gotten their money's worth. While it's impossible to know exactly how much they've spent on his videos, we can get a rough estimate by summing the amount of money Mr. Beast spent in those videos. In total they spend approximately $200,000 over 10 videos and got 260M views from it. Considering even his videos today rarely break that view count yet cost millions to sponsor, it's fair to say they got a good deal. But what's the company up to today?

Quidd sparked my interest and was the reason I wanted to write this post, because they clearly got a lot of visibility through Mr. Beast but when I looked through their website, it seemed like they pivoted a few times and it wasn't clear how they were making money. In Mr. Beast's original ads, he pitched them as a free trading card app where the "cards" you collected were stickers from your favorite TV shows that you could use in messaging apps. However, as expected they pivoted to NFTs and these days the packs are no longer free and you'll see crypto terminology like buying "drops" from the "collection" to add to your "wallet" and "stake".

In 2018, they stopped sponsoring Mr. Beast. Either they weren't seeing a return on investment or his videos got too expensive for them.

Honey

Originally I didn't have much to say about Honey. They were a browser extension that helped find people coupons. I installed it once and after trying it for a little bit, I realized that it didn't really find me any deals so I uninstalled it. They made money off of referrals when people use their coupons and I left it at that. However, as I was writing this, a pretty big story came out that showed how Honey was stealing referral links. More details can be found in this video but the summary is that when users came to storefronts through any referral link, Honey would pop up with their coupon code which would give them the referral. But even if there wasn't a coupon code the extension would pop up saying it "didn't find any deals" and when you click to dismiss it, it would take a commission. Also, it turns out that shops could disable certain coupons from showing up on Honey which defeats the entire purpose of using the extension.

Honey sponsored Mr. Beast in 3 videos, gaining a total of 140M views after spending approximately $120,000.

TikTok

If you haven't heard of TikTok by this point, you're probably living under a rock. They've taken the world by storm and while I'm not sure their advertising campaign on YouTube videos is the sole reason for their success, it definitely contributed to it - taking it from an app that just had lip syncs and musical.ly users to one with all sorts of short form content which would eventually create a whole new genre of online video.

Coincidentally, TikTok is also quite newsworthy right now with it about to be banned in the United States.

Mobile games

I put all of these into a single category since they all use the same kind of predatory marketing practices and freemium model to get players to part with their money:

1. daily quests that keep people coming back to the app
2. confusing currencies and tokens which obfuscate the true cost of in game purchases
3. lootboxes and other luck based mechanics

Raid: Shadow Legends

They were everywhere 5 years ago, sponsoring almost every creator, big and small, comedy to gaming, on every website you could think of - YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, etc. Even I got an ad deal (that I didn't end up taking).

But fast forward to today and I can't remember the last time I saw an ad for Raid. They seem to be a shadow of their former self, losing millions of monthly active users per month and 75% of its average viewership from the peak days (https://sullygnome.com/game/Raid_Shadow_Legends/2020).

Raid sponsored only 1 video which got 65M views - "Donating $100,000 To Random Streamers"

Battle Royale games

The Fortnite sponsorship is interesting because while they only sponsored one of his early videos, he used them in many of his other videos - usually in videos where he donates money to Fortnite streamers or doing Fortnite challenges. Also, even though they only sponsored one of his early videos, it seems like they're stepping up their marketing budget because more recently they've sponsored 2 more videos of his.

Also, with the PubG sponsorship, it's not clear how much they paid since the video was "Can 1,000 Rolls Of Duct Tape Stop A Car??". Given similar videos around that time cost $30-50k,$40,000 is a fair estimate.

War Robots and DragonCity

War Robots is a game that I've never heard of until writing this post. It seems pretty similar to Raid and they've only sponsored 1 video for around $50,000 which got 15.8M views.

DragonCity, like War Robots, is new to me, but apparently they were popular enough to sponsor 3 videos for a total of $270,000. In total those videos got 354M views, however given how I've never heard of them, I'm not sure if they made a return on their investment.

It seems like especially for these kinds of mobile games, user retention is hard and unless you're constantly adding new content and advertising, the game would eventually fall off. We see that with games like Fortnite staying relevant because of all the new content they add, while games like PubG and Raid fall to the wayside.

Conclusion

What was the point of this? Honestly, I don't know. Originally I thought it would be fun to see how far businesses got by spending a relatively small amount of money on an early Mr. Beast video. Turns out most of the businesses that could spend tens of thousands of dollars on an unproven creator tend to be ones making money through relatively underhanded business practices.

In my next post I'll talk more about Mr. Beast's business endeavors and more modern sponsorships and some surprising facts that I came across while analyzing all the data. Like how some of his videos today have multiple sponsors on top of him shouting out his own businesses and why most of his videos from 2020-2021 don't have any sponsors. I'll also discuss more about my methodology and tools I used to automate most of this data collection. If this is popular I might try analyzing other creators too.

After all that's been going on in the news with honey and other Mr. Beast controversies, I wanted to take a look at where he started off so I did a deep dive on some of his early sponsors. Check it out!https://t.co/ytj31cMbKq

— preethamrn (@preethamrn) December 28, 2024