Opinion
Do you recognise this man? He has 300 million die-hard fans but isn’t famous
Waleed Aly
Columnist, co-host of Ten's The Project and academicPerhaps the single largest mass-truancy event in Australian history took place in front of the Sydney Opera House on Wednesday, when thousands of school-aged kids gathered to see MrBeast in the flesh.
If you find that sentence incomprehensible, or fear it is the fulfilment of some prophecy from the Book of Revelations, you’re far from alone. Which is remarkable because MrBeast probably has the largest audience of anyone in the world. I’m not exaggerating.
Thousands of fans flocked to the Sydney Opera House to see Youtuber MrBeast in person. Credit: Getty Images
He is, right now, the biggest YouTuber on the planet. He has nearly 300 million subscribers: I hesitate to give a more precise figure because he adds about half a million every day, so whatever I write will be out of date before it is published. His most watched video is a real-life (though far safer) recreation of the Netflix smash Squid Game. MrBeast’s version has 624 million views: comfortably more than double what Squid Game itself could manage – and it’s the most watched show in Netflix history. MrBeast’s more standard fare videos routinely surpass 150 million views. For context, about 120 million Americans watched the Super Bowl this year, and roughly 70 million watched The Beatles perform on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964.
And yet, every news story reporting on his Opera House event had to explain who he is because it couldn’t presume such knowledge in the audience. I’ve just devoted two paragraphs to it here.
Which leads me to ask what must surely seem like an absurd question: is MrBeast famous? And to venture an even more absurd answer: not really, no. At least, not in the full sense of what “fame” traditionally connotes. I don’t mean this as a slight. It doesn’t remotely diminish MrBeast’s achievements. It just captures an extraordinary social phenomenon which is the very mark of our age: that possibly for the first time in history, the size of someone’s following is not a synonym for their level of fame.
There’s no doubt MrBeast is big. Massive, even. If his subscribers were a country, they’d be outnumbered only by India, China and the US. He is therefore, by any measure, known by lots of people. But to say that’s all fame means is to miss the nuances of what we tend to mean by it.
Famous people aren’t just well known: they are widely known. They’re familiar to a range of people, even if those people share no common interests or tastes. They will have fans, but those fans will probably constitute the minority of those who recognise them. When that is reversed, when someone is known mostly by devotees and not widely beyond that, even if there are lots of them, we tend to describe them as “cult”.
Fame therefore has an element of unavoidability. You can’t help but know who Donald Trump or Taylor Swift or Usain Bolt are. You might not know a great deal about Cristiano Ronaldo or Michael Jordan, but you’re very unlikely to draw a complete blank, and quite likely to know more than you realise. And you’ll know them even if their work is aimed at another demographic: even people without children know The Wiggles, for instance.
Famous people don’t require you to seek them out or join a subculture. Their presence is ambient, even atmospheric; they’re just in the air. Voluntarily or involuntarily, we breathe them in. That is how they become intelligible reference points right across a culture. In that sense, fame is less about the raw number of people who know you, and more about how they do.
Youtube star MrBeast is one of the most popular content creators in the world.Credit: Instagram
That’s why the shortest route to fame has traditionally been broadcast. The clue is in the name: the broad dissemination of personalities right across the social spectrum. You will likely recognise a film star, television personality or pop star even if you’ve never sampled their work, because broadcast tends to turn them into icons or avatars. That process was obviously more intense before the arrival of social media and streaming, but even the diminishing power of a broadcast confers a level of recognition beyond its raw numbers. If a broadcaster and a social media star have roughly the same-sized audience, the broadcaster will likely be more widely known.
In MrBeast’s case, people know him because their YouTube algorithm funnels them to him. This isn’t an accident. MrBeast revealed as much when he told Rolling Stone of “a five-year point in my life where I was just relentlessly, unhealthily obsessed with studying virality, studying the YouTube algorithm”.
No doubt he’s mastered that, which is why he can reach such extraordinary numbers of people. But this method is, in a certain sense, a private, personalised way of becoming known. MrBeast is offered to you, and you specifically, in a machine-curated way. Accordingly, MrBeast will not be offered to others using the very same platform, and they will have no idea that has even happened. So, while his following is enormous, MrBeast is avoidable in the way traditionally famous people are not. He isn’t in the air. He’s in the network, and there’s every chance you’ll completely miss him if you aren’t in it, too.
We’re seeing more of this: people you’ve never heard of selling out arenas. That was once impossible because the route to such an audience was inescapably public: you had to pass through mass culture to get it. Fame occurred in a sequential kind of way: you got bigger and bigger in that culture until you could be called famous.
MrBeast created possibly the single largest mass truancy event in Australian history at the Sydney Opera House this week.Credit: Getty Images
But MrBeast is something else altogether. He’s the central figure of a massive, global subculture; at once colossal and niche. This is what is newly possible: to have a massive following, but not a mass following.
That only happens because culture is in the process of fracturing into a collection of subcultures. Those subcultures might be huge – many times bigger than our own society – but simultaneously not big enough to occupy our shared cultural imagination. That seems a paradox, but it actually tells us something reasonably clear: that culture is an inherently public thing that can’t truly be nourished by the private logic of algorithms, no matter how many people they connect. Society, it seems, cannot be held together by networks. It needs the air to breathe.
Waleed Aly is a regular columnist.
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