Nicole Lapin

His videos routinely do more than 125 million views, and he posts a lot, way more than the annual Super Bowl opportunity.

There is a financial opportunity here, of course.

But critically, not just for the people who want to be on camera.

There is still money to be made even if you do not want to be an influencer.

So make sure to listen all the way to the end because I share three ways to invest in the creator economy right now.

But to make the business case, let's use Mr. Beast as an example and go back to the days before he had 470 million YouTube followers.

Jimmy Donaldson started posting on YouTube in February of 2012 at 13 years old on a channel called MrBeast6000, which was named after a random Xbox gamer tag that the platform generated for him.

He started by creating gaming content, but as he was posting, he became fixated on cracking the algorithm.

He told Rolling Stone that he spent five years in what he called an unhealthy obsessed state where he was constantly analyzing why certain videos worked and why others didn't.

He graduated from high school in 2016, enrolled at East Carolina University and lasted all but two weeks before dropping out.

And then his mom kicked him out of the house.

So Mr. Beast was out on his own.

He had no money.

He had no safety net.

And he had a YouTube channel with fewer than 30,000 subscribers.

But he kept at it.

And his breakthrough came in January of 2017.

know this story until I started doing the research myself for this video, but it is pretty nuts.

He posted a video called I Counted to 100,000, where he literally does just that.

It took him 40 hours to film and the final edit is only slightly shorter.