Jimmy Donaldson, better known as the YouTuber MrBeast, said Monday that he made over $260,000 in revenue on X (formerly Twitter) after he shared one of his videos to the platform. But he called the figure “a bit of a facade.”
“MY FIRST X VIDEO MADE OVER $250,000!” he posted. “Advertisers saw the attention it was getting and bought ads on my video (I think) and thus my revenue per view is prob higher than what you’d experience.”
Donaldson made the statement after a week of questions from many X users about how frequently they were seeing his video on the platform. Some users speculated it was being promoted in undisclosed ways because of how many times they’d seen it on the platform.
Donaldson posted the video after X owner Elon Musk invited him to. Donaldson said he’d test out the platform while also saying he didn’t think the revenue would be equivalent to the costs of making his videos.
Donaldson’s first X video was a video he originally posted to YouTube in September comparing a $1 car to a $100 million car. According to metrics Donaldson shared, the post on X was viewed more than 156 million times in a week. On YouTube, the video has 215 million views in four months.
Donaldson has more than 233 million subscribers on YouTube, making him the most-subscribed-to person on the platform. He has 26 million followers on X.
After the video was posted, some X users who said they hadn’t updated their apps reported that the post was marked as “promoted,” fueling speculation that it was being run as an ad.
An NBC News review of Donaldson’s post found that X users had the option to select “Not interested in this ad” when it appeared in their feeds. That option typically isn’t available on posts that aren’t advertisements.
Donaldson and Twitter didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
It’s unclear what Donaldson meant by saying he thinks advertisers “bought ads on my video.”
After Donaldson posted his X revenue from the video, other X users who monetize their posts complained in his replies that — as Donaldson guessed — they make far less revenue for a similar number of views. Some monetized users even said they received no revenue this period.
“Yeah wtf Elon literally gave you all our ad rev cuz we got NOTHING.. LMFAOOO,” replied an account with over 200,000 X followers.
After he revealed the figure Monday, Donaldson said he would give away his X earnings from the video to 10 of his X followers.
Donaldson’s experiment and the claims around his posts follow scrutiny of X’s metrics from some users.
Since Musk introduced the ability for the public to see how many times posts are viewed, some users have questioned how useful the metrics are and whether they’re misleading. Unlike YouTube view metrics, which show how many times users have actually watched a part of a video, X metrics show how many times a post was viewed in total, even if a user didn’t engage with or click on it at all.
