MrBeast’s Not Doing So Well

November was MrBeast’s worst month on YouTube since we started tracking the site, and he’s very aware of it. So much so that he issued a public apology before the month was over. But before we continue if you want to check out The Big Spreadsheet, where put all of our monthly Garbage Intelligence insights, hit the big green button below.

On November 26th, MrBeast, real name Jimmy Donaldson, posted to X, “After some reflection, I just want to say I think some of our newer youtube videos haven’t been as good as I wanted. I apologize. Ya boy is going to go into ultra grind mode and make the greatest content of my life in 2026. Promise.” Grim stuff.

Whether or not you accept ya boy’s apology, it speaks to a situation that extends past YouTube to MrBeast’s entire multimedia empire. He’s chased the algorithm all the way to the top, but recent figures and statements suggest he may not have any plan for what comes next.

Donaldson averages around 10 million new subscribers every month. But he only gained about four million in November, according to data from Playboard. That’s an enormous number by any normal standard, and comparing him to the rest of the platform still puts him solidly on top. That four million is at least 15% more than November’s second place channel (which, for the record, was a grindset guy who posts clips of his podcasts to YouTube Shorts). But the number still falls far short of MrBeast’s usual performance.

Back in September, the channel gained 14 million new subscribers. That’s a huge drop for just two months, and the numbers show it’s not just a problem with subscribers. We took a look at the last 10 longform videos uploaded to MrBeast’s channel, ignoring outliers like his video recorded ten years ago, and used Internet Archive snapshots to track how many views they got in their first 24 hours. Here’s how bad this slump looks if you put it all together:

Looking at this chart, it’s easy to see why Donaldson felt he had to apologize. Especially when you consider that the MrBeast brand can really only be defined as “being popular.” So if the views drop, he is quite literally not delivering on the one thing he’s known for. But let’s see if we can figure out exactly what’s gone wrong for Donaldson.

The least-popular video from the last six months was the channel’s latest 100-person challenge. The comment section is filled with people unhappy about the winner, but that’s a standard reality show kind of problem. None of the other videos he’s published during his 2025 slump generated any kind of controversy among commenters or even wider critics. Which is actually the worst case scenario. It doesn’t appear that he’s made anyone mad. They’re just bored.

And this makes sense if you look at YouTube, in general, right now. We’ve spent a while tracking dozens of different MrBeast copycats on the platform. Some have courted controversy for directly reusing his ideas and visuals. Others are what we call “regional MrBeast variants,” who use similar strategies for videos in other languages. The most successful in November was a Russian YouTuber named Vlad Samokatchik (fifth place, 2.2 million new subscribers). And there are thousands of other MrBeast variants ripping off everything Donaldson is known for.

Which means Donaldson’s only option is creating something bigger, more impressive, more popular, than his imitators. It’s been his winning strategy from the beginning — more money, more people competing for it, and so on. Beast Games, his independently produced Amazon Prime series, billed itself as the “largest game show ever in history,” featuring thousands of people hoping to win five million dollars. But this strategy seems to be failing.

Speaking at the New York Times’ Dealbook conference this week, he said, “I learned why people don’t have 2,000 people compete in a show, because you’re creating a scenario where 1,999 aren’t happy.” He later added, “Obviously, yes, some people sue you.” He’s talking about the lawsuit from five of those unhappy contestants, alleging unsafe conditions while making the show, echoing multiple crew members who lamented how difficult such an enormous production was to run.

That’s a much deeper problem than just drooping YouTube traffic. Donaldson’s operation has been ruthlessly focused on engagement metrics for over a decade. He’s been willing to take on whatever form the algorithm likes, eagerly adjusting factors like  “yelling” and “personality” as nimbly as Dril’s infamous racism dial. But some things can’t be changed so easily, and others — like safety regulations, apparently — will break if you stretch them too far. Donaldson is now 27, which we suggested last year was “too old to make content slop.” If — as the numbers suggest — viewers are starting to lose interest with him, in general, winning them back would take an unprecedented, radical change from someone who’s already older than most previous top YouTube accounts were at the peak of their popularity. And there isn’t a lot of evidence that he’s going to pull it off.

At the Dealbook conference, he was joined on stage by the CEO of his corporation, alleged Peloton streaker Jeff Housenbold. He said the company is planning a “two-sided marketplace” to “match creators with [...] marketers who want to be able to access the creator influencer economy.” In other words, an agency. We’re sure MrBeast’s audience, which Tubefilter reports is 39% teen boys, will be hyped for that one.

In Case You’re Wondering How Reddit Is Handling The Luigi Mangione Trial, This Was The Top Post On Reddit In November

Degenerate Gamblers Bet Big On Spotify’s Year End Numbers

If it feels like prediction markets suddenly appeared out of nowhere, you’re not wrong. We’ll be doing a big piece on Monday all about the sudden explosion of platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi. (The Kalshification of the web? Anyone? Anyone?)

But here’s weird side story that popped up as we were collecting monthly Spotify data, which data from Kworb says is still topped by Taylor Swift (212 million streams for “The Fate of Ophelia”) and KPop Demon Hunters (172 million streams for “Golden”). Streams for the top tracks are down 32% over last month. We initially thought was thanks to holiday music starting up early (84 million streams for “All I Want For Christmas Is You”), but we also think it could be Spotify itself changing their numbers.

Because when Spotify released their Wrapped on December 2nd, they announced that The Weeknd was the third-most-streamed artist of the year, even though Drake had previously been listed with billions more overall streams. The numbers suggest that Spotify had subtracted artificial streams by bots, which may be thanks to a recent lawsuit against them.

Prediction markets come into this because there were millions of dollars of bets placed on the order of Spotify’s top 10, which was enough to send people digging into Spotify’s code, where they apparently found the list a day early and were able to place bets on the information, big enough to swing the whole market. Spotify changing their metrics is already big news, but it looks like we aren’t done with prediction markets leading to those metrics getting leaked — the same thing happened to Google Trends a day later.

Sora Is Cooked And Chopped And Unc

OpenAI launched their AI-generated TikTok clone, Sora 2, as a standalone app in late September. Do you, uh, even remember that? Well, it’s understandable if you don’t, because apparently no one bothered downloading it. Sora 2’s AI video feed has yet to crack 100,000 total downloads per day since it hit app stores, according to AppFigures, and downloads have dropped by around 60% since September.

To put that in perspective, across the same time period, ChatGPT gets around half million downloads a day on iOS and well over a million a day on Android. Ouch.

It would be easy to file this under “people hate AI,” but I actually think it tells a more interesting story. The consensus, especially for folks in Silicon Valley, is that TikTok is not really a social network, but actually an entertainment platform. As in, TikTok and YouTube both see themselves as competitors to Netflix. It certainly seems like the bet OpenAI made — “we can make an entertainment app too” — but it seems like, at least for now, you still need user-generated content generated by actual users to make these kinds of platforms stick.

And we bet OpenAI is not exactly thrilled at how popular AI slop (sometimes their AI slop) is on other video platforms. Speaking of which…

AI Slop Is Still Very Popular On YouTube

This is the third-fastest growing channel on YouTube right now. It’s called Cappy Shu, it has over four million subscribers, and makes Spanish-language content about a capybara. It is the definition of slop and it is very popular.

It’s also somewhat interesting comparing the kinds of AI slop we’re seeing on YouTube versus other platforms. For instance, there were two AI animal videos in our top Facebook posts list this month. Unlike the capybara videos, which no one would ever think is real (we hope), this video of AI kittens and this video of an AI cat fighting a dog are absolutely meant to trick people into thinking they’re real.

It seems like even AI can’t stop Facebook users from posting low-effort engagement bait.

Did An Indian Billionaire Buy His Private Zoo To The Top Of Instagram?

The biggest account on Instagram in November was @vantara, a private zoo in Gujarat, India, owned by billionaire Mukesh Ambani. It’s gotten into some trouble with the United Nations, and our numbers suggest that it tried to buy millions of new followers as a way out.

Back in September, Vantara was accused of illegally or improperly importing animals and is now getting a lot of attention from international wildlife regulators. On November 11th, Indian authorities asked the UN to let them handle it. The same day, data from Social Blade shows Vantara’s Instagram account gained over 8 million followers in a single day. The chart above shows there was zero change in engagement on their posts, and it’s been losing followers ever since, more evidence the followers aren’t authentic.

A week later, the UN retracted their statement against Vantara, but the zoo has already become a flashpoint in Indian politics, as The Wire reported in September following the initial raid. Ambani is a huge supporter of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, so more than a few eyebrows were raised after Modi’s investigators went after Vantara. It doesn’t look like all the extra followers have helped Ambani or the zoo. Its biggest online footprint since then were some angry memes after Donald Trump Jr. visited Vantara in late November.

Quarter Zips Are So Hot Right Now

Some Stray Links

P.S. here’s an incredibly good Spotify Wrapped.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***