MrBeast vs The Super Bowl

Total ad spending on Super Bowl LVII in 2023 likely exceeded $600M. Advertisers crave big audiences and the live championship game of the most popular sport in America is among the largest available.

Less conventionally, MrBeast’s short form videos of stupendously creative content have made him the most popular creator in YouTube history. How does his audience compare to the Super Bowl?

Surface level metrics aren’t very helpful and headlines can be misleading. Variety reports that the “2023 Game Scores 113 Million Viewers.”

Meanwhile, YouTube shows us that as of Feb 2014, 2023, MrBeast’s last 8 videos averaged?109 Million views.

A glance at these numbers might suggest that MrBeast is as big as the Super Bowl! In some ways, I think he is (I’ll get to that soon), but linear TV ratings are calculated very differently from digital viewership metrics and the two can’t be directly compared. The “113 Million Viewers” represents the average number of viewers for any given moment of the broadcast, while YouTube reports the total number of times a video has been viewed, ever. For more on this topic, Nielsen describes it well here:

Another comparison metric could be total reach, or unique viewers, of the content. Helpfully, Nielsen also reports that 183M people watched any part of Super Bowl LVII. Furthermore, ESPN reports “that 185 million fans watched games at some point during the 18 weeks” of the 2022 NFL Regular Season. This tells us that the total reach of the NFL is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 200M people.

We don’t know how many unique viewers MrBeast has on individual videos but by definition it’s less than the total view count. So we can say definitively that the Super Bowl has a higher unique reach than the average MrBeast video on his main channel.

As difficult as it is to average 100M views on YouTube, MrBeast occasionally does much, much better. His $456,000 Squid Game in Real Life! Video has 365M views, and he has several other videos approaching or exceeding 200M views.

And this is just his main channel. Much of this content is dubbed into Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian and posted on non-English channels. As of Feb 15, 2023, the Squid Game video has accumulated 525M across these 4 channels.

So it is possible that a single MrBeast video can match or even exceed the unique viewership of the Super Bowl, but we don’t know for sure because we can’t see his unique viewer data. What about MrBeast’s channel as a whole? He recently shared on Twitter that his main channel reached an astonishing 616M unique viewers in the last 90 days.?

So while individual MrBeast videos may occasionally match the reach of the Super Bowl, the channel as a whole has 2-3x the annual reach of the entire NFL.?

But, All Reach is Not Created Equal

1. Timing of Viewership

The Super Bowl’s reach occurs all at once, creating a truly unique opportunity for a large audience to simultaneously experience the same content. Super Bowl advertising also taps into one of the dominant cultural rituals of American life, and all of the conversation surrounding the overall spectacle of the event, including the scrutiny and celebration of the ads themselves.

YouTube Video on Demand content works differently. MrBeast’s Squid Game video was dropped on Thanksgiving day 2021 and earned 43M views in the first 24 hours. This viewership was promoted by MrBeast to his many followers on social platforms and this jumpstart helped the YouTube algorithm to quickly figure out that people loved the content, leading to more visibility on YouTube, driving even more views.

It took another 3 days to reach 100M total views, a record pace, and the view count kept climbing - by January, 2022 it had accrued 200M views.

Incremental viewership leveled off at that point, but 15 months later that single video still accrues well over 500k views per day, on average. Social Blade reports that MrBeast’s main channel averages 35M views per day across his entire catalog of content, and north of 1 Billion views per month.

2. Audience Location and Demographics

The Super Bowl is predominantly an American audience, while MrBeast reaches a lot of people outside of the US (617M unique viewers is much greater than the US Population of 333M).?

Tensor Social reports that over 50% of MrBeast’s audience is a male between the ages of 18 and 34,

while the Super Bowl attracts an audience of all ages.

3. Consistency

With a Super Bowl spot, a media buyer generally knows what they’re going to get because the viewership is fairly consistent year over year, especially when adjusted for streaming and Out-of-Home (i.e. watching at a sports bar).

MrBeast’s content is much more variable, with a range of 69M to 173M views over the past year. The majority of these views occur within a few days of the video being posted, but they continue to accrue over time.?

What game are you playing?

The Super Bowl and MrBeast both attract massive audiences and offer special opportunities for advertisers.

The Super Bowl is a unique media buy for an advertiser that wants to predictably reach a large portion of the US population at a single point in time, while tapping into the cultural zeitgeist of this magical moment. While aspects of the execution have been criticized, the strategy behind FanDuel's live Kick of Destiny with Rob Gronkowski was sound. FanDuel is naturally affiliated with sports; adding a live ad with real stakes, featuring a star athlete, authentically leaned into the spectacle of the Super Bowl generating conversation before, during and after the game.

And it delivered results

MrBeast offers advertisers a rare opportunity to reach an even larger global audience, that skews young and male, over a longer period of time.?And for less than $7M. One of his happiest advertisers might just be, well, himself, as he has 173M views on his World's Most Dangerous Escape Room! Video promoting the launch of his Feastables chocolate bars.

And another 162M views on his I Built Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory! video further promoting Feastables.

MrBeast and The Super Bowl can both be great media wins, it just depends on the advertiser's goals - and of course, their budget.?After all, even MrBeast doesn't want to spend $7M on a Super Bowl ad.