Content on YouTube and other video networks is becoming more and more like fast food: clone flavors, different packaging (although with few differences). MrBeast It is currently the global reference on the platform and has sparked a race to replicate its challenge-show-prize format, flooding other people’s profiles (both North American creators and Spanish streamers) with content with very few differences between them. What we have lost along the way: the personality that turned YouTube into an alternative to traditional television.
What are these videos about? A hook in the first ten seconds, absolutely obscene amounts of money at stake (figures like $250,000 in weekly challenges), many people screaming a lotan editing rhythm that doesn’t let you breathe. This is how Jimmy Donaldson’s channel, better known as MrBeast, works, and this is how those of hundreds of creators work who, to a greater or lesser extent, have copied his visual grammar, which ranges from the speed of editing to the video thumbnails themselves. In Spain, Its most relevant copier is Ibai Llanos.
But is everything as the same as it seems? According to some studies, yes. This 2024 analysis discussed how YouTube’s recommendation system tends to reduce the diversity of content that reaches the viewer, favoring what researchers call “densely interconnected content communities.” The mechanism is circular: the algorithm rewards what already works, the creators replicate what the algorithm favors, the viewer sees more of the same. Whether it is all part of a plan or something that has simply evolved in that direction is a dilemma that remains subject to discussion.
The practical result is a platform where the average video thumbnail includes a face with an open mouth, a large red number, and some high-value object. Youtube Product Manager has recognized that the algorithm drives 70% of all views on the platform, meaning that more than the creators themselves, it is the system that decides what thrives and what doesn’t. And YouTubers have to study it and embrace it if they want to upload. of visits.
The first times. For years, around the middle of the last decade, YouTube was a platform that encouraged experimentation: the first big channels, like PewDiePie or the Vlogbrothers, and in Spain people like the foundational AuronPlay, ElRubius or Wismichu, to name just a few, made spontaneity a format and built their video empires on their own personalities. Long, sometimes chaotic videos, where the audience’s loyalty did not come from the spectacle but from the identification with whoever was speaking to the camera. It was parasocial content in the most literal sense: the hook was to sit down and watch someone, week after week, and feel like you knew them.
How he triumphed. MrBeast spent, by his own account, between 20,000 and 30,000 hours studying YouTube before building the most viewed channel on the platform. In 2023, a 36-page internal document titled “How to Succeed in MrBeast Production” (or ‘How to Succeed at MrBeast Production’, an onboarding manual for new employees) was leaked online. Its content was revealing: the content of the videos formulated as engineering to retain the viewer with precise metrics, tested formats and detailed analysis of important elements of the videos, such as the so-called “wow factor”, and the suggestion of never reusing the same format twice in a row so as not to fatigue the audience.
The triumph. This industrial production manual applied to entertainment worked like a charm: the youtuber brought in 54 million dollars in 2022 alone and surpassed 300 million subscribers in 2024, becoming the first individual channel to reach that number on YouTube. MrBeast himself knows perfectly well that he makes a very imitated model. On the topic declared: “many people copy me every day, but it would be hypocritical to get angry with them”, referring to the fact that his fortune comes from studying previous content that worked. Nobody is blameless. Among his most notable copiers are A4 (Vlad Bumaga), Brent Rivera, Yolo, Morgz.
It is copied. In 2023 Ibai Llanos issued the second edition of ‘The Last One Standing’: Ten streamers locked in a square, the one who lasts the longest wins 50,000 euros (in the first edition it was 30,000). Ibai himself made it clear that the format was based directly on MrBeast videos (“it’s great in the United States”). He did it in his own style, of course: he not only published a summary of the event, but it was broadcast live in an eight-hour stream.
The relationship between the Spanish-speaking ecosystem and MrBeast had another interesting crossover. In July 2024, Ibai, Rubius, Spreen and Quackity participated in a video by the North American creator with fifty content creators from around the world. The video has more than 447 million viewsalthough the Spanish streamers appeared for just a few seconds. Ibai acknowledged that “Compared to North American YouTubers and streamers, we are insignificant”,
That has not prevented the formula from continuing to be replicated on a local scale. The productive infrastructure of Ibai (Kings League, The Evening of the Yearthe Ibainéficos) responds to a similar logic: the event-show as a unit of content and money as a narrative engine. In the case of Ibai, the truth is that the Spanish creator strives to maintain his personality, although most of his formats and approaches would not exist without the precedent of MrBeast.
Where are we going? MrBeast seems to sense that the formula has a limit, and there are signs that he is aware of the exhaustion that his own formula generates. In September 2025, the YouTuber himself described one of his most recent videos as “less screaming, slower, more story, more emotion,” and the video surpassed 83 million views in four days. The spectacle continued to predominate (two ex-boyfriends had to remain chained to win a large amount of money), but the feelings and drama were just as high as the substantial prizes. New tiger costume or the same old striped pajamas?
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