I just came across an article at Bloomberg attention.
This article is about Jimmy Donaldson, who dropped out of school in 2016 at the age of 18 and is now one of the most famous Youtubers. He always wanted to find out how a video goes viral on Youtube. He had been posting videos on Youtube since the age of 12 without much success. But he was always convinced that one day he would succeed in achieving astronomical viewer numbers with his videos.
From then on, together with his friends, he conducted "YouTube research", so to speak. Daily analyses of the most successful viral videos followed. Donaldson reports that he did nothing but study YouTube videos all day long.
One day he had an idea that he was convinced would give him a breakthrough. He sat down on a chair and muttered one number after another for the next 40 hours until he reached 100,000. As simple as the idea was, it was successful. The video titled "I counted to 100,000" was a viral hit! In the meantime, it has achieved 21 million views since 8 January 2017.
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This video has since made Youtube history. Donaldson now has 48 million subscribers with the Youtube channel "MrBeast". None of his videos has less than 1 million views. Most of the time, the views are in the multi-million range.
On 12 December 2020, Donaldson was awarded the Streamy Award. This award is the YouTube equivalent of the Oscar.
The consistent success of MrBeast's videos has attracted the attention of the YouTube establishment.
In the past year, every video he has posted has reached 20 million views. This consistency is unprecedented even among YouTube's biggest stars. "He lives on a different planet than the rest of the YouTube world," said Casey Neistat, a very well-known YouTube star.
I find this story very impressive. It shows that if you have a vision and believe in it unconditionally, it can come true.
