MrBeast makes $250k on X, Returning my Apple Vision Pro, and more

Did you know that MrBeast made $250 grand on X?

I did.

Yeah? What'd you think about that?

I don't know how it actually worked on X's end, but my theory is, is because it's MrBeast and they want to entice more people like MrBeast who have a massive social following to post more video content, his content was going to do better and perform better from a revenue standpoint than most people's. And then the other thing to keep in mind is Even though he produced 250,000, the video he used was one of his good videos, right? Because not all his videos hit— they all do well, but some do much better than others. And the other factor is, is he spends an arm and a leg to create his content. Most people don't spend that much money. And if you look at how much he generates in ads versus how much he's spending, I bet you he's losing money if it was just a straight monetization play.

So yeah, I'm looking at this tweet over here. So my first X video made over $250K. It's a bit of a facade. Advertisers saw the attention it was getting and bought ads on my video, I think, and thus my revenue per view is probably higher than what you'd experience. So it got 156 million impressions, 5.1 million engagements, and then $263K in revenue. And then he gave it all away. And then I think he tweeted afterwards and it became a super viral tweet saying he gave $25 grand 10 times.

Wow.

If they follow or like reengage or like retweet. And I think that got like hundreds of millions of views or something like that. So he like, Leverage the attention to get more attention.

I think that was smart of him. And hey, $250 grand is better than nothing. And he already had that video on YouTube and any other social channel that he probably uses, which I'm assuming is all of them. But it's a smart model. If you're creating content, I don't get why people don't just post it on all platforms. It's like extra reach. And dude, I know people who post on Twitter, we have mutual friends, some of them get no likes.

Yeah.

And it's like, it's okay. It's— you're still getting some impressions. It's better than nothing. You know, don't be Don't be ashamed of having little to no engagement. It's better than nothing.

I'll tell you what. I mean, you know the— I'll tell you what's good for MrBeast. What he should do, I believe, is, you know, he has a SaaS called ViewStats.

Okay, he has a what called ViewStats? A SaaS.

Software as a service, you know?

Okay, yeah.

So ViewStats, go to viewstats.com, and it's like Social Blade, but it's better. And so the cool thing, you should definitely have your team do this, but you can see the videos. You can see videos on my page, and you can see how many times I've ran tests on each particular video. When I started doing an A/B test, when I started doing a thumbnail test, how many I've ran. And so now we have something where we can hold our people accountable too. We can see how many tests they're running because we want them to run a lot of tests, right? And I think, I just think the analytics are better. He's not charging anything for this right now. And I think it's one of the better YouTube tools that are out there. And maybe he'll start charging $5 a month or $10 a month.

I'll have to check it out.

Yeah.

On a side note, going back to YouTube and even X and MrBeast and just social in general, Dude, it was funny. Did you see the chart that someone ended up posting on Reddit of Netflix's revenue per user versus Facebook?

No, what is it?

I believe it was $194 for— where is that? I'm actually pulling it up. Netflix was $194 per year per user. Facebook, $207 per user per year.

Wow.

And it's so funny because everyone talks about, hey, you need to have these cool, you know, hip businesses. You want to charge for subscriptions. And everyone's like, subscription businesses are better. Ad businesses are ugly. You see all these ads out there, no one wants them on the platform. But at the end of the day, you know, money's money. And you and I have been in business long enough. Just look at the companies that you talked about in your retreat. One was a quilt business. One is a phone service. One buys WordPress plugins. One's a pet insurance or pet industry business.

One focuses on debt.

One focuses on debt, like Capchase.

No, no, no. They are sorry. It's pay for performance for debt. Okay.

Another one focuses on analytics for SaaS, but he sold that company, right? Yeah, Patrick.

Yeah.

None of the companies, and I'm not trying to belittle any of these people. I'm in the same boat. None of these people have sexy companies. No, I don't have a sexy company. No, you don't have a sexy company. The riches are in ugly.

Hey, that's a good clip.

No, the riches really are in ugly. Microsoft is not a sexy company. Yes, Apple is a sexy company, but if you look at a lot of the large corporations out. There. Facebook is not sexy. Microsoft is not sexy. Google is not sexy. Amazon is not sexy, right? Sexy is like Louis Vuitton.

Yeah.

Sexy is like Coca-Cola or Airbnb or like consumer stuff that everyone's like, wow, that's so cool. Like Tesla to me is sexy. Yes, there is money in Tesla and even LVMH. I think he is currently the richest person or the second richest depending on the day.

And also, who knows if Elon gets that $55 billion payout, you know?

Yeah, that'll affect his net worth. But However you look at it, yes, there are people who make a lot of money doing sexy businesses. But if Eric and I look at our network, most of the people we know and most of the other entrepreneurs, you know, in our circles or even outside of our circles that we've talked to, most of them have made their money from ugly businesses.

And usually it's one thing.

Yeah, it's one thing. You know, I know someone in YPO that just manufactures product for one of the biggest apparel companies and they generate over $1 billion. How ridiculous is that? Just do one thing for one corporation. Your margins aren't going to be the highest because they're going to squeeze you because there's so much money, but you're still making tens and tens of millions of dollars a year in profit. It's not sexy, but it still prints cash.

You know what's funny? We look at Twitter now, or I look at Twitter, and it's like you see the same mistakes happening over and over. So you learned your lesson, you know, I learned my lesson. We got punched in the face before to focus, right? And then to do one thing for a very long time. And then you see people that are just super smart, And they talk about their holding company or the 10 different things that they're doing or like, you know, I just started this company over here and it's a completely unrelated business. But then they're also making fun of people that are telling them to focus. And it's just like, dude, it's like you look at it, it's like you're waiting for this train to crash.

Yes.

Basically. So I don't know. It's just you see the same thing over and over. We're just telling you guys, those of you that are doing multiple things probably should just do one thing. By the way, Neil and I have an agency owners group called the Agency Owners Association. All you have to do, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. Once again, it's marketingschool.io/agency to learn more. And now back to the show.

Focus is so important. We've talked about this in the past, but Warren Buffett and Bill Gates got asked a question on what do you think is one of the most important factors that have led you to your success? It was something like that. I'm paraphrasing. They both wrote on a piece of paper without talking to each other. It was at the same time, I believe, and they both wrote down focus. Focus is super important. And everyone looks at, you know, I was talking to someone the other day and they were like, you know what? I think the new thing is not focus. If you look at a lot of people like Elon Musk and stuff like that, they're doing a lot of things at once.

Oh yeah, I was like, who told me? You told me that. I told you that.

And I was at dinner and I respect the person who ended up telling me, he's really smart. We both know him, mutual friend of ours. I agree with that if you're Elon Musk. Most of us are not Elon Musk. For most people, 99.99% of the population out there, you need to focus. There's not enough time in the day to build a massive company. Elon is able to do it. Most people don't. And I think it's one because he's extremely brilliant, but I also do believe there is some luck on his side as well. There was a VC named Guy Kawasaki and Guy Kawasaki wrote a book called—

Is he a VC?

He used to be.

Yeah.

He was Apple's evangelist. Then he had Garage Ventures, which is his venture. fund.

Oh, I didn't know that.

He had it for a long time. And then from there, he became an evangelist for Canva. He's done well in his life. But when you look at Guy in his book, Art of the Start, you know, he talks about in life, if he could pick, he'd rather invest in luck. Because if you look at a lot of the businesses that have done well, a lot of things you can't control. Like if you look at YouTube, was it Vimeo that got bloody and went out there and fought all the battles with video being online?

Was it Vimeo?

Veo, I think. Veo. It was one of those video platforms that got bloody Before you, and they paved the way for YouTube. Yeah, right. It wasn't that YouTube had a better idea. Someone else got bloody before them dealing with laws and regulations, which also helped pave the way for YouTube to just go and crush it.

And the YouTube acquisition by Google was, it was lucky too, because YouTube couldn't support all the server costs and everything.

Dude, and it was so expensive. They paid, what was it, $1.8 billion? I haven't seen it in a long time.

$1.1 or something.

No, I think it was higher than that. Wasn't— I thought it was $1.8 or something ridiculous.

Here, let me just type it in. YouTube acquisition.

YouTube Google buys 1.65.

You're close.

1.65. Either way, that's a ton of money. And everyone back then thought they overpaid for Google or for YouTube. And now look at it. It's worth over $100 billion in Google stock. They're laughing to the bank. That was one of the best acquisitions they made. I consider that luck. If you look at the Instagram acquisition by Facebook, part of it was luck. I think the Instagram founders really kicked themselves For selling out. Now that thing would have been worth over $100 billion itself.

Who knows? I mean, you know, I would say afterwards Google really improved. Without Google's like product updates to YouTube, it wouldn't have gone where it went. And then I know when Instagram sold, they only had a couple people. But actually, this actually parlays into this tweet over here. I don't know if you saw this. Have you seen this graph before? So this graph here, I'll read it out and those of you that can't see the screen.

Newspaper advertising and then is it—

Yeah.

And with adjusted with inflation?

Yeah. Uh, well, billions of dollars not adjusted for inflation, but you can see there's a blue line over here which shows the, the newsletter industry.

Show it to the camera.

Yeah. Newsletter industry over here going to $67 billion or so. And then all of a sudden in the 2000s, Google comes out of nowhere and then Google is like this pink line. It just shoots up and you see all these other advertising platforms shooting up, but the newsletter platform or newsletter industry just goes down.

Newspaper industry.

Sorry. Sorry. Not newsletter.

Newspaper.

Newspaper. Yeah. The blue line just goes completely down. Right.

So basically it's, It's when legacy—

so, so here's, here's the tweet from Balaji. So Balaji says, it's when we now understand the 2010s, it's when legacy media fought a ferocious but ultimately doomed rearguard campaign against the internet. That's why they pushed censorship so hard and constantly thumped their chest about being journalists. It was protectionism. They were dying. So it's interesting because the other thing is you can see the thousands, hundreds of thousands of newspaper employees. It just goes straight down and you hear about all these layoffs that are happening. It sucks that people are getting laid off.

That sucks.

This kind of goes into what you're just saying. It's like, why do people buy Instagram? Why do people buy WhatsApp? Why do people buy YouTube? It's because of the attention. That's where the money is.

And look at Facebook making $207 per user over Netflix's $194. And what is Netflix doing now? Introducing ads. What did Amazon do? Introducing ads. Dude, I met up with a guy at Amazon. I forgot at what conference. It was somewhere in Utah. It was for an e-commerce conference. And he wanted to sit down and he's one of their spokespersons, deals with their whole ad platform. He's like, Neil, if you want to put this bottle of water in one of the shows that we make, we can switch it out for X amount of impressions. And then if you want to change the shoes on the person, we can change the shoes, we can adjust placements of different products for shows and movies that we produce. And you can actually have ads integrated into the media. We didn't get into pricing. He was pitching it to me to pitch to all of our customers.

Got it. Got it. Well, and by the way, I mean, this is gonna be the thing we could wrap up on. Talking about changing things up, AR and VR, you tweeted about your, your Apple Vision Pro experience.

Dude, the Apple Vision Pro. I have another one in my unit. I got 2.

I thought you were returning it.

Yeah, I did return the first one.

Oh, so you still have one?

I got to return the second one too.

Okay.

I ordered it literally at like 5:02 or 5:03 or something like that in the morning the day it first came out. And then I found that I was going to get it like 4 or 5 days later. So I'm like, screw this. So I went to Apple and I bought one and I told the lady, she's like, just return the other one. So then I bought it, put it on, Thing was amazing technology-wise. I think it is the future. There's not enough essential apps on there. It's too heavy and it gives you a headache if you at least have contacts. My— I have LASIK, so I don't have prescription lenses. But you know that feeling if you wear contacts or glasses for the very first time, it gives you a headache for a bit?

It hurts.

Yes. You get the same feeling when you end up doing it the other way around.

Yeah. So anyway, I mean, you said it's good. You think it's going to be game-changing. Andrew Wilkinson tweeted something. He said he thinks it's going to be game-changing. Um, or sorry, no, he thinks it's a novelty. So it's kind of like how you think about it right now. It's more of a novelty than anything.

Yes.

Austin Reiff of Morning Brew, he thinks it's going to be game-changing technology. So we'll see where it's going to go. I'm the type with this type of stuff, I, I'm usually an early adopter, but I'm going to wait for like one iteration or two. I've been waiting on iterations for Apple Watch for a while. I still don't have one right now because I just don't like wearing things. But anyway, That's that for this episode. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.

Bye.