Do you recognise this man? He has 300 million die-hard fans but isn’t famous

Save articles for later

Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.

Perhaps the single largest mass-truancy event in Australian history took place in front of the Sydney Opera House on Wednesday, when thousands of school-aged kids gathered to see MrBeast in the flesh.

If you find that sentence incomprehensible, or fear it is the fulfilment of some prophecy from the Book of Revelations, you’re far from alone. Which is remarkable because MrBeast probably has the largest audience of anyone in the world. I’m not exaggerating.

Thousands of fans flocked to the Sydney Opera House to see Youtuber MrBeast in person. Credit: Getty Images

He is, right now, the biggest YouTuber on the planet. He has nearly 300 million subscribers: I hesitate to give a more precise figure because he adds about half a million every day, so whatever I write will be out of date before it is published. His most watched video is a real-life (though far safer) recreation of the Netflix smash Squid Game. MrBeast’s version has 624 million views: comfortably more than double what Squid Game itself could manage – and it’s the most watched show in Netflix history. MrBeast’s more standard fare videos routinely surpass 150 million views. For context, about 120 million Americans watched the Super Bowl this year, and roughly 70 million watched The Beatles perform on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964.

And yet, every news story reporting on his Opera House event had to explain who he is because it couldn’t presume such knowledge in the audience. I’ve just devoted two paragraphs to it here.

Which leads me to ask what must surely seem like an absurd question: is MrBeast famous? And to venture an even more absurd answer: not really, no. At least, not in the full sense of what “fame” traditionally connotes. I don’t mean this as a slight. It doesn’t remotely diminish MrBeast’s achievements. It just captures an extraordinary social phenomenon which is the very mark of our age: that possibly for the first time in history, the size of someone’s following is not a synonym for their level of fame.

There’s no doubt MrBeast is big. Massive, even. If his subscribers were a country, they’d be outnumbered only by India, China and the US. He is therefore, by any measure, known by lots of people. But to say that’s all fame means is to miss the nuances of what we tend to mean by it.

Famous people aren’t just well known: they are widely known. They’re familiar to a range of people, even if those people share no common interests or tastes. They will have fans, but those fans will probably constitute the minority of those who recognise them. When that is reversed, when someone is known mostly by devotees and not widely beyond that, even if there are lots of them, we tend to describe them as “cult”.

Fame therefore has an element of unavoidability. You can’t help but know who Donald Trump or Taylor Swift or Usain Bolt are. You might not know a great deal about Cristiano Ronaldo or Michael Jordan, but you’re very unlikely to draw a complete blank, and quite likely to know more than you realise. And you’ll know them even if their work is aimed at another demographic: even people without children know The Wiggles, for instance.