YouTube content creator MrBeast (real name Jimmy Donaldson) recently made a surprising prediction about the platform’s trajectory. In an interview, Donaldson laid out his vision for where YouTube is headed over the next decade.
“I think YouTube is only going to grow bigger and bigger because it comes pre-installed on Android, you know, Google funnels people to it, Alphabet owns all this, so almost every area of the internet points to YouTube,” he said. “So I think YouTube is going to keep growing and at least like the next five to ten years.”
He didn’t stop at modest optimism. Donaldson went further, suggesting that the platform is on a path to surpass something that once defined American culture entirely.
“In ten years, YouTube is going to be bigger than television ever was for culture, in America at least, in my opinion,” he said. “And so I think a lot of people underestimate that.”
Part of what Donaldson finds so remarkable is the scale of direct access top creators now hold, without the gatekeepers that once controlled the entertainment industry.
“You don’t need a network, you don’t need to go through people, you just are,” he said. “And you can do whatever you want and you can influence people how you want. It’s just wild, it’s mind-blowing and you can leverage that to build businesses or, you know, do things like Beast Philanthropy or whatever.”
According to Donaldson, his channel routinely reaches audiences that most television executives could only dream of. “For us, we have a hundred million people on average that watch almost everything we put up,” he said. “If you include non-English and English, everything we do, a hundred million people will watch.”
At the height of television’s cultural grip on America, appointment viewing for major network broadcasts was considered a phenomenon. Today, a single YouTube creator is reaching comparable audiences entirely on his own terms, on a platform available to anyone with an internet connection.
Donaldson reflected on just how unprecedented that reality is. “When has someone else ever had that kind of power without having to go through a network or anything?” he asked. “I can just upload whatever I want. I can upload a black screen, you know what I mean, and hit tens of millions of people.”
The creator acknowledged that even he struggles to fully process what that means.
“I think people don’t realize just how crazy it is,” he said. “I don’t even know where I’m going with it, but, like, you know, how much influence the top YouTube channels have.”
