MrBeast's Squid Game video hit 130 million views in a week with a $3.5 million budget fully sponsored by Brawl Stars. The hosts estimate he made between $500,000 and $1.3 million in ad revenue alone, plus gained 10 million subscribers in that time.
So just some numbers. The video got about 130 million views in 7 days, which is crazy. I think, I, I believe, Ben, you can fact check me on this. I believe 130 million views is more than what the actual Squid Game's got on Netflix.
Now Netflix is a paid service and whatever, but like, and people watched, uh, like multiple episodes. Yeah. Yeah. 12 hours of, of footage. It's still, yes, it's still amazing.
But the fact that it's comparable, the fact that somebody just watched the show and was like, oh yeah, we'll do like a backyard version of that and got 130 million people be able to watch is insane. So, uh, he spent $3.5 million on it. Just to kind of put this in perspective, um, that's basically half the cost of a 30-second Super Bowl commercial.
Wow, really? Did you have a sponsor?
It was fully paid— I believe fully paid for by Brawl Stars, the, the big, the super popular mobile game. So if you look in the arena where it was, where it was hosted, it's a giant Brawl Stars arena. They have a huge logo that was in every shot. And so for Brawl Stars, this is such a smart move. They basically paid half the cost of a Super Bowl ad, got more viewership than a Super Bowl ad because you get 130 million people. The video is like 20 minutes long, 27 minutes long, versus a 30-second clip. And, um, this is an epic thing that's going to get shared. And then they could take this content, repurpose it for ads or anything else they wanted to do after the fact if they wanted to. So really smart, you know. For Brawl Stars, $3 million is probably their daily— is a one day of ad spend on Facebook or something.
Brawl Stars is owned by Supercell, and Supercell is like the the biggest game, um, the— yeah. And so if I— I don't know if this is how it would have worked. If I'm MrBeast, I think he could have— so he would have gotten Supercell to pay for the whole thing, so $3.5 million. I bet he also would have gotten another, like, $500,000, just like—
there's a vig on top of—
yeah, just like, just for that. And then they would have probably— I would have said to them, also, I'm gonna keep YouTube ads on this And MrBeast, I get all of it. And so if MrBeast is getting, uh, 130 million views in the first 7 days, and if you do maybe $4 per CPM, that's around half a million dollars that he got in the first week. Plus, I believe he got—
his deal is gonna be a lot better than $4 CPM, uh, because he's the number— he's like, you know, one of the faces of YouTube. These guys have custom negotiated deals that I would bet a lot of money is better than the standard kind of $4 to $5 CPM.
What do you think it is?
I bet he's getting closer to $10 CPM.
So if it's 10, that's 1.3 million.
Yeah, and just in a week.
In a week. Plus, according to our notes, it looks like he got 10,000 new subscribers.
Million. Million.
Sorry, sorry. Oh my God, 10 million new subscribers in the first week. In a normal week is 400,000 subscribers.
So he's 20x'd his subscriber growth. So, so what does this do? He continues to be the content leader. He gets 10 million new subscribers and those people are gonna get notified for his next video. He makes $1 million on ads. He gets the whole thing paid for by a sponsor. And this is a great example of something we've talked about before. We talked about this with Elon when Elon does epic stuff, like I'm gonna go to Mars. We talked about it with, I forgot the guy's name, Mark Lasry or whoever it was that's building that epic train, train system in America. I, I ranted about Disney, Disneyland last week because again, when you shoot for these epic projects, things that get people inspired and excited, it's, it seems like it's harder to pull off, but in many ways it's easier to pull off cuz you'll get talent to pour in cuz they wanna be a part of something bold. You'll get sponsors to pour in cuz they wanna bet on this, this epic thing that's gonna happen. They know that it's gonna get a lot of visibility. And so, and you get your own motivation to get outta bed every day because you're working on something that's so, so grand that, you know, you're more motivated. Everybody does their best work and people tune in to watch, which is is like, uh, so Ben just looked it up, 140 million, 142 million people watched Squid Games on Netflix, 132 million watched, uh, Beast Games on YouTube. So about the same, 1 to 1. So you get disproportionate prizes when you go fish in a part of the pond that nobody else is fishing cuz everyone else thinks the water's too deep and it's too scary over there. The rewards are like disproportionate even to the effort and the work that goes in.
