MrBeast is the most successful YouTuber of all time, but copying him isn’t likely to yield the same results.
In a recent interview with the journalist and YouTuber Jon Youshaei, Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, said some creators attempted to “copy and paste” successful content, while others were inspired by their peers.
YouTube is full of creators trying to imitate MrBeast’s style. Some have the same type of thumbnail and the same overlay text and even visit the same places Donaldson does. Many even try to impersonate him by mimicking his voice and characteristics.
Youshaei said there was a difference between “plagiarism, which is not good, and remixing and elevating.”
‘Copy with taste’
He described the latter as “copy with taste,” meaning “elevating the past, giving credit, and then blending from different sources.”
Donaldson agreed that copycat content was noticeable because a creator would post a video in which the only difference between his and theirs was the level of resources.
“We don’t need someone else doing my videos with lower budget and less effort,” Donaldson said. “We need people doing their own version of it with their own unique spin and taste.”
Donaldson pointed to Ryan Trahan, a YouTuber with 15 million subscribers, as an example of a creator who was inspired by him but had developed his own original style.
“Ryan has his own voice; he’s quirky,” Donaldson said. “We need more people like that.”
Xavier English, a cofounder of the content-creation agency Supermix, told Business Insider that simply copying the surface layer of a popular video was “missing the point.”
While it might help in the short term by generating a good number of views, he said, there would remain a lack of understanding about why it worked in the first place, and that would backfire.
English added that such creators “ooze fakeness,” which “audiences can smell a mile away.”
“You could drop MrBeast at a Neanderthal campfire 50,000 years ago, and he’d probably tell a story with a 70% audience retention rate,” English said.
“His content doesn’t succeed because of what you can see on the surface or flash-in-the-pan trends. It’s because of a deeper understanding of timeless human psychology,” he said.
Copycats are 10 steps behind
Katya Varbanova, the owner of the content-marketing firm Viral Marketing Stars, told BI being yourself was in and copying others was out.
“The difference between pioneers like MrBeast and copycats is that pioneers are 10 steps ahead,” she said, “making it impossible for copycats to win because the pioneer is learning from and making mistakes the copycat hasn’t even gotten to yet.”
Varbanova said knockoffs of popular creators weren’t likely to win in the long run because they’d “always be a few steps behind.”
The main difference between copying and inspiration, she said, was “lazy research.”
“Copying is where you simply follow what your competitors do,” she said. “Inspiration is when your competitors’ content is only one piece of the puzzle in your research.”
Donaldson, for instance, started out performing challenges in his bedroom (such as counting to 100,000 in one sitting). He gradually increased the ambition, budget, and scale of his stunts until he reached where he is now: recreating Squid Game, shredding Lambourginis, burying himself alive, or stranding himself on a desert island.
Isla Moon, a fishing influencer and OnlyFans star, told BI it was difficult to find “a truly original idea” as a content creator, but copying wasn’t the answer.
“It just leaves a sour taste in your mouth because it’s simply a lack of effort on their part,” she said.
Moon added that copying Donaldson also wouldn’t work because of his rare access to such vast resources, which would probably make any copycats underwhelming.
“If you’re basing your whole content idea on what someone else is doing, you’ll run out of ideas eventually because you’re solely dependent on what someone else is doing without throwing in anything new,” she said. “It’s just not sustainable.”
Kaye Putnam, a psychology-based brand strategist at Freewyld, told BI that originality would pay off in the end, not being a “secondary version” of someone you aspire to be like.
The key to building a strong brand is for creators to understand who they are and how they can express that to the world — looking inward before focusing on others for inspiration.
“Stop trying to model what success looks like,” Putnam said. “Yes, it’s natural to model success, but the less you try to be like someone else, the more attention that you get for your work.”
