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I'm Nicole Lappin, the only financial expert you don't need a dictionary to understand. It's time for some money right now. Here's the number I want you to sit with for just a second. 2.6 billion. That is the estimated net worth of a 27 year old kid from Greenville, North Carolina who dropped out of college after two weeks because he wanted to make YouTube videos. That kid is Jimmy Donaldson. You know him as MrBeast. If you're thinking that you don't have anything to learn from the monetization strategy of an influencer who lights cars on fire, I just want you to stop there for a minute. Because more than 30% of Gen Alpha and 57% of Gen Z want to be creators. And even though a lot of people were sort of dubious about the whole space in the beginning, it is undeniable that the creator landscape is big business. The creator economy is now worth $250 billion worldwide, which is larger than the GDP of more than 100 countries. Goldman Sachs predicts that the creator economy could reach $480 billion by 2027. By 2032, projections put it anywhere between $700 billion and nearly a trillion dollars. Creators are driving our purchase decisions when it comes to what we watch, what we wear, what we eat, what we drink, and what medicines we even take. It's completely disrupting the way companies advertise. Here's the proof. For decades, the Super Bowl has been the largest stage for advertisers to compete, right? To get in front of roughly 125 million people watching the Super Bowl this year, advertisers spent an average of $8 million for a 30 second commercial. But Mr. Beast has 470 million followers on YouTube alone. 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 Mr. Beast 6000, 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. I actually didn't 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. It clocks in at 24 hours long. The video is still on YouTube, if you want to see it. I definitely did not watch the entire thing. I skipped around a little bit, but I did find the edit equal parts absurd and compelling. When he posted this video, it went viral almost immediately. He hit one million subscribers that same year. The video sounds really silly on paper for sure, and maybe it is, but it does show a deep understanding of what the internet wanted in that era. Commitment to a ridiculous bit and putting serious effort into a very unserious stunt. From there, Jimmy started reinvesting every single dollar he made back into bigger, more elaborate content. Here's how Mr. Beast's model actually works, because it's not what most people think. YouTube ad revenue is definitely the engine, but it's not the profit center. His channels, he has over a dozen of them, pulled in roughly 9 billion views in 2024 alone. The main channel now has over 469 million subscribers, making it the most subscribed to account on YouTube. It's hard to find legit information on how much brands actually pay for sponsored content on Mr. Beast's channels, but his earnings from content and brand deals in 2024 were estimated at $85 million by Forbes. It sounds like that should have been an amazing year for Mr. Beast's bank account, but he actually spent most of it. Individual YouTube videos cost Mr. Beast between $3 and $5 million each to make. His production company Beast Industries had over $473 million in total revenue in 2024 and still ran out of loss because he poured everything back into the business. So no, the content itself is not how Mr. Beast is getting so rich. His videos are actually lost leaders for his consumer goods empire, and that is where the real money is. In 2022, Jimmy launched Feastables, a chocolate and snack brand. By 2024, Feastables was generating over $215 million in revenue, and it turned its first meaningful profit. It's now in Walmart, Target, Kroger, and 7-Eleven. It accounts for roughly half of Beast Industries' total value. Think about that. A YouTube channel built a snack brand that now rivals mid-tier legacy consumer goods companies in just a matter of two years? The trick was the distribution channel that he already owned, his own audience. Every video is essentially a commercial for his product lines, but it doesn't feel like one because the videos would exist anyway. Then there's Beast Games. In March of 2024, Jimmy signed a reported $100 million deal with Amazon MGM Studios to produce a reality competition show, a thousand contestants competing for a $5 million prize, the largest cash prize in reality television history. The goal was to make a sort of real-life squid games just without all the violence. Season 1 debuted in December of 2024, and it hit 50 million views in just 25 days, making it Prime Video's most watched, unscripted show ever. It was renewed for two more seasons before Season 1 even finished airing. Season 2 is out right now, and it is so cuckoo crazy wild, like gigantic floor-is-lava games. Crazy. Here's the lowdown on the Amazon deal, though, because this is where it gets financially very interesting. The $100 million deal sounded massive, but Mr. Beast said on the Diary of a CEO podcast that he spent tens of millions of dollars beyond that on production out of his own pocket. Just the first two episodes set costs at around $15 million and $14 million respectively, so he lost money on the deal. He literally said, quote, I would have had more money if I didn't film it. But he got something he thought was worth the investment. 50 million new eyeballs from a platform that he didn't have to build himself. He used Amazon as distribution infrastructure, which means his brand got deeper penetration globally without building it himself. Whether that trade-off was worth it is debatable. Fast Company made a compelling case that Amazon got the better end of that deal, because even though Mr. Beast got access to the Amazon audience, Amazon got access to Mr. Beast's audience. So it's hard to declare the real winner of that deal. But it signals something really important about where Mr. Beast is going. He's not just a YouTuber building a snack brand. He's a vertically integrated CPG founder with an owned media channel. And that media channel happens to have started on YouTube. In September of 2025, Beast Industries raised money at a valuation of $5.2 billion, led by Alpha Wave Global. Jimmy retained majority ownership there. That round is what pushed his paper net worth to approximately $2.6 billion. The company projects $899 million in revenue for 2025 and nearly $5 billion by 2029. So a kid who was kicked out of his mom's house in 2016 is now running a company valued like a mid-sized media company. Now, I'm sure we are all so, so happy for him. But let's talk about what this means for the rest of us. Like I said, the creator economy is not niche anymore. It's one of the fastest growing markets in the world. But the good news is, because it's turning into such an established industry, you won't have to be an influencer that spends 40 hours counting to 100,000 in order to get a piece of that growth. Just like you don't have to be an AI engineer to get a piece of the AI industry. That's because institutional money is paying attention. Creator economy startups raised over $767 million between 2023 and 2024. Traditional media companies, private equity firms, and venture funds are all circling. So here are three ways to benefit from the growth of the creator economy. Option one, the infrastructure layer. Full disclosure here, this is where I think the risk reward is least understood. Companies like Patreon, Substack, and other subscription-first platforms are enabling an entirely new revenue model for creators, recurring subscription income that doesn't depend on ad algorithms. Most of these companies are private, but as the space matures, IPOs will come, and these will be worth watching closely. In the meantime, you can look at publicly traded companies building creator tools, analytics platforms, production software, content management systems, but many of these companies are racing to own the market. When it comes to business competition, there's no such thing as a tie. It's not like three competitors get three equal slices of the pie. It's a winner takes most model. So there is more potential for growth if you happen to pick the winning newsletter company who will own the creator economy. But there's also more potential for loss if you pick the runner up. There are also new companies popping up every single day in the space, so it's unclear if the winner even exists yet. Option two, the obvious place. Alphabet, which owns YouTube, is the clearest proxy for creator economy growth. Every time the creator ecosystem expands, YouTube's ad revenue goes up and so does Alphabet's bottom line. Same logic applies to Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, two of the most active creator monetization platforms on the planet. These are large cap publicly traded companies that you can buy today, if you do your research, of course, with meaningful exposure to creator economy tailwinds. Option three, the less obvious play. Shopify is one of the most underrated creator economy beneficiaries. The creator to consumer goods pipeline runs directly through platforms like Shopify. Similarly, hello beyond YouTube, Apple and Spotify and other platforms are benefiting from the explosion of podcast content and direct creator monetization. If you believe the creator economy continues to grow, owning the platforms where creators monetize is one of the most durable ways to invest. For today's tip, you can take straight to the bank. Instead of buying creator branded consumer products themselves like the chocolates, the energy drinks, the merch, buy stock in the companies that manufacture and distribute them. When Mr. Beast Feastables lands on shelves that let's say Walmart, Walmart definitely captures margin on every unit sold and so does the distribution network behind it. Creator brands are built on attention, which is so volatile, but the distribution infrastructure that they depend on, Walmart, Target, Shopify, Amazon is not. So the next time you're tempted to spend four bucks on a Feastables bar because you love, love, love the brand, think about spending that $4 on fractional shares of the actual company that put that product on the shelf. You're essentially investing in every creator brand that passes through that same pipeline, not just one.
