MrBeast’s media business lost $80M — but his chocolate made $20M

If you’re a content creator hoping to bring in big bucks on YouTube, you might want to pivot to chocolate instead. After all, it made MrBeast $20 million last year.

MrBeast, who you may know as Jimmy Donaldson, has certainly diversified his portfolio. The 26-year-old millionaire has leveraged his significant social media following — 372 million on YouTube and 66.5 million on Instagram — to sell a lot more than content. His company, Beast Industries, is a majority owner of Feastables, which sells his chocolate, which Mashable’s Tim Marcin calls “pretty good!” The chocolate is so “pretty good” that it generated $250 million in sales and more than $20 million in profits last year, according to documents sent to potential investors reviewed by Bloomberg.

His media business, which includes his YouTube channel and his reality show, produced similar sales but lost nearly $80 million in the same time period, Bloomberg reported.

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As Casey Lewis pointed out in her newsletter After School, this comes at a time in which YouTube creators are having to spend more money to produce higher quality videos to keep up with a TV-viewing audience without a significant increase in pay from the platform, ads, or brands. This cost issue likely doesn’t intimately affect MrBeast’s work, but it seems to point towards a larger monetization trend: It might be more profitable to sell your brand in the shape of a chocolate bar than it is to sell your work on social media platforms.

Or it might just mean that people like chocolate.