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HOW TO

SUCCEED IN

MRBEAST

PRODUCTION

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HI

Hi, I’m Jimmy (MrBeast) and as the team is growing larger, I no longer get

to spend as much time with everyone as I used to. The first dozen employees

had unfiltered and unlimited access to me to learn as much as they could about

my vision and what I wanted. Sadly, you don’t have that luxury. So, I thought it

would be useful to try to braindump as much as I can into this silly little book to

give new people to help bring them up to speed on everything we’ve learned over

the past decade with this channel. We’ve been through a lot and chances are

most of the problems you face we’ve dealt with. So I genuinely believe if you

attently read and understand the knowledge here you will be much better set up

for success. So, if you read this book and pass a quiz I’ll give you $1,000. Sorry

in advance for all the run on sentences and grammar issues, I’m a youtuber not

an author haha.

This is not a rulebook.

I need to kick this thing off by saying the purpose of this is not to give you a

bunch of rules to follow. On top of that I want nothing in here to be taken literally.

What we do is complex and changes based on the situation. I need you to repeat

this in your head three times: “I will apply everything I read with a grain of salt.”

This is not an inclusive list of everything, I hope this inspires you with questions

and to come to us to learn more.

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Prelude (idk what this means)

I could make a separate book for creative, a separate book for production,

a separate book for editors, etc. but I think that’d be dumb. Everything we do

here is interconnected and the more you understand about what others are doing

and trying to accomplish, the better set up for success you will be. So this will be

information about all parts of MrBeast productions and I advise everyone to read

it in its entirety. A good example of this is James Warren. He understands every

single part of this company at a deep level and as a result can make decisions

faster than anyone else. The stuff you will be reading about he knows like the

back of his hand. I’ve seen a team of 5 people work on a project for a week just

to give up and James solve it in 30 minutes. I say this not to flex for him but to

show the power that comes when you understand everything in this book deeply.

The more you know about why we do things and what we are trying to

accomplish, the better off you will be. So let's start off with some basic stuff.

What is your goal here?

Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the

number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced

videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not

the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.

Everything we want will come if we strive for that. Sounds obvious but after 6

months in the weeds a lot of people tend to forget what we are actually trying to

achieve here.

Idc how traditional media does things

Pardon the bluntness but this is not Hollywood and I do not want to be

Hollywood. And if that sentence is a turn off to you then you’re probably at the

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wrong job. I genuinely mean that. Youtube is the future and I believe with every

fiber of my body it’s going to keep growing year over year and in 5 years Youtube

will be bigger than anyone will have ever imagined and I want this channel to be

at the top. Which is why I say we are not Hollywood. 99% of movies or tv shows

would flop on Youtube. On top of that they'd be wildly unprofitable, have no

flexibility, and long lead times that can’t adapt to trends. We arn’t here to make a

small movie once or twice a year, I want to make one a week lol. Which is why

you need to be nimble and produce content OUR way, not the way you were

taught before. If you want the highest probability of success I beg you to learn

why we do what we do at a deep level before you try to “fix” anything. We’ve

done countless videos and invested hundreds of thousands of hours collectively

building how we do things. I know it’s not perfect but we have a reason for how

we do most stuff and it’s probably a decent one.

The Amount of hours you work is irrelevant

Before you get mad, recall the story about James solving a problem in 30

minutes a team of 5 couldn’t in a week. In that example does it really matter how

many hours they worked? Obviously we want grinders that put in the hours and

love you guys to death that do. But at the end of the day you will be judged on

results, not hours. We are a results based company. Get shit done and move the

goalpost!

I only want “A Players”

As I type this I realize it may not be the wisest to categorize everyone into

3 buckets but this is how I believe we should look at everyone a part of the

production team. You’re either an A-Player, B-Player, or C-Player. There is only

room in this company for A-Players. A-Players are obsessive, learn from

mistakes, coachable, intelligent, don’t make excuses, believe in Youtube, see the

value of this company, and are the best in the goddamn world at their job.

B-Players are new people that need to be trained into A-Players, and C-Players

are just average employees. They don’t suck but they arn’t exceptional at what

they do. They just exist, do whatever, and get a paycheck. They arn’t obsessive

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and learning. C-Players are poisonous and should be transitioned to a different

company IMMEDIATELY. (It’s okay we give everyone severance, they’ll be fine).

Chapter 1: What makes a Youtube video viral?

I spent basically 5 years of my life locked in a room studying virality on

Youtube. Some days me and some other nerds would spend 20 hours straight

studying the most minor thing: like is there a correlation between better lighting at

the start of the video and less viewer drop off (there is, have good lighting at the

start of the video haha) or other tiny things like that. And the result of those

probably 20,000 to 30,000 hours of studying is I’d say I have a good grasp on

what makes Youtube videos do well. The three metrics you guys need to care

about is Click Thru Rate (CTR), Average View Duration (AVD), and Average View

Percentage (AVP). Make sure you know those abbreviations because that's how

most people will refer to them. Up first we’ll talk about CTR. This is important no

matter what department you work in. CTR is basically how many people see our

thumbnail in their feeds divided by how many that click it. If 100,000,000 people

see our thumbnail and 10,000,000 click on it then that means 10% clicked and

we have a 10% ctr. This is what dictates what we do for videos. “I Spent 50

Hours In My Front Yard” is lame and you wouldn’t click it. But you would

hypothetically click “I Spent 50 Hours In Ketchup”. Both are relatively similar in

time/effort but the ketchup one is easily 100x more viral. An image of someone

sitting in ketchup in a bathtub is exponentially more interesting than someone

sitting in their front yard. Titles are equally as important for getting someone to

click. A simple way to up that CTR even more would be to title it “I Survived”

instead of “I Spent”. That would add more intrigue and make it feel more

extreme. In general the more extreme the better. “I Don’t Like Bananas” won’t

perform the same as “Bananas Are The Worst Food On Earth”. Now if you’re in

production or creative you might be wondering, why does the title and thumbnail

matter to me? Expectations is why. The title and thumbnail on the videos you will

be producing set the expectations for the viewer for your video. Imagine you

clicked on a video titled “World’s Largest Bouncy Castle” and the thumbnail had a

giant yellow bouncy castle beside a bunch of huge buildings. Then when the

video plays it's not a yellow bouncy castle, it's red. It’s also not the world’s

largest. It’s also in a field with no buildings like the thumbnail. You’d feel like you

were lied to and click off because the video did not meet the expectations of the

title/thumbnail. THIS IS WHY YOU MUST KNOW THE TITLE AND

THUMBNAILS OF THE VIDEOS YOU ARE MAKING! How can you know how to

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start your video if you don’t even know what expectations the viewers have of

you?

Now let's jump over to the second metric that matters. AVD. This is how

long on average people watch a given video. The cool thing about Youtube is

they give us super detailed graphs for every video that show the exact second

we lose a viewer on every single video.

See that blue line in the image above? That represents the attention span of the

60 million people that clicked on this video. It’s crazy but we can see exactly

when every single person who clicked on this video clicks off. As with almost

every video on Youtube, the first minute has the most loss (go look). This is why

we freak out so much about the first minute and go so above and beyond to

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make it the best we freakin can. On this particular video we lost 21 million

viewers in the first minute of the video (which surprisingly compared to other

channels is above average) and could have been much worse. Let’s say the start

of the video wasn’t well-lit, I didn’t match the expectations of the clickbait, I didn’t

pre plan what I’d say, and we didn’t front load some interesting stuff for the first

minute of content, we would have lost much less then 21 million people. Because

it wouldn’t have even got 21 million views lol. But if the views were hypothetically

fixed then instead of still having 39 million viewers at the 1 minute mark it would

be more like 20 million viewers. The first minute of each video is the most

important minute of each video.

After the first minute of content you will have what we call minutes 1 thru 3.

This is where you have to transition from hype to execution (generally). Stop

telling people what they will be watching and start showing them. An example of

a 1 thru 3 minute tactic we would use is crazy progression. Let’s say we have 10

minute video about a guy surviving weeks in the woods. Instead of making the

first 3 minutes of the video about his first day then progressing from there like a

logical filmmaker would. We’d tried to cover multiple days in the first 3 minutes of

the video so the viewer is now super invested in the story. They’ve seen this man

survive multiple days in the woods and emotionally now want to see how much

further he can go. We also want to do something around the 3 minute mark

called a 3 minute re-engagement. A re-engagement can be described as content

that is highly interested that fits the story and makes people genuinely

impressed. Another way to look at this is it’s a segment that “only MrBeast can do

this”. It’s important to re-engage the viewer around this time because they could

get bored of the story and click off. These re-engagements are usually spectacles

and sometimes need lots of time and money to perfect. A good example of a

re-engagement is when Karl was put in charge of watching Josh in the “$10,000

Every Day You Survive Prison” video.

Following the first minute, then minutes 1 thru 3, is obviously what we call

minute 3 through minute 6 and is the next most important part of the video. This

is where you plan out all the most exciting and interesting content that is also

very simple. This includes lots of quick scene changes and highly stimulating

simple content that reflects the story. The goal is to make them fall in love with