How the creator economy destroyed the internet

Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, has the most popular YouTube account with over 450 million subscribers, or a little over 1 in 16 people in the world. His success with high-production, high-output stunt videos have made him the aspirational model for independent content creators everywhere: the actualization of the promise that, thanks to the internet, gatekeepers no longer stand in the way of viral fame and the riches that supposedly come with it.

Some might say that the extraordinarily famous content creators at the top represent the exception that proves the rule, but even Donaldson, no matter how agape his algorithm-pandering maw, can’t actually make money from YouTube. Financial documents revealed that the content arm of the MrBeast empire is a tremendous money loser — three straight years in the red, including a whopping negative $110 million in 2024. In fact, today all of those viral videos are just a marketing front for the real MrBeast business: a line of mediocre chocolate bars, available at your local Walmart. If the dream was that content creators were supposed to forge a new way to make money, the reality is that they’re relying on the oldest method: selling millions of people crap they don’t need.

In this series, The Verge dives into the ever-shifting, ever-fucked-up incentives that fuel the content machine across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. There was a time when the internet wasn’t constantly trying to sell us things. Now, what was once mostly contained to large commerce giants has encroached on every nook and cranny of the web. It’s eating the internet, swallowing the web whole and all of us with it. Maybe that’s why MrBeast’s mouth is always wide open.

• Knock it off! — Getting copied is devastating — but not necessarily illegal. Who owns what in an era of unprecedented mass consumption?
• Hot Subpoena Summer — The convoluted saga of Justin Baldoni, Blake Lively, and It Ends With Us is still raging on social media, thanks to influencers.
• News Daddy ❤️ New York Times 🤡 — College students are choosing TikTok and Instagram over newspapers and magazines. And though they know social media is rife with misinformation, they still won’t give it up.
• Stop, Shop and Scroll — Behind every influencer is an army of the influenced, many adrift in debt and mass-produced clutter. The platforms need influencers and influencers need audiences — but what the influenced need is not so simple.