MrBeast just crossed half a billion subscribers. A YouTube first.

Jimmy Donaldson, the 27-year-old from Greenville, North Carolina, just became the first individual creator in YouTube history to cross 500 million subscribers. The MrBeast channel flipped to the half-billion mark on Friday during a 90-minute livestream that drew more than 600,000 concurrent viewers. No solo human has ever pulled an audience this big, in any medium, anywhere on earth.

What actually happened?

The moment landed on a stripped-down white backdrop set, the polar opposite of the warehouse-scale productions that built the channel. When his team flagged the counter was about to flip, Donaldson asked, "Wait, we're about to hit it?" Then came the eruption. According to TheWrap, the stream ran roughly 90 minutes and drew over 600,000 concurrent viewers.

The receipts behind the headline are violent. The channel gained 115.97M new subscribers in 2024 alone, an all-time YouTube record for a single year, per ElectroIQ. India contributed 47M of those last year. His February 2026 upload "Subscribe for an iPhone" hit 1 billion views in 39 days, the fastest 0-to-1B run in YouTube history.

For scale, the second most-subscribed YouTube channel, India's T-Series record label, sits at roughly 310M. Cocomelon is third at about 200 million. MrBeast more than laps both of them as a solo operator, per Brandwatch.

The trajectory is what makes the number absurd. Donaldson became the most-subscribed individual creator in November 2022 and overtook T-Series for the top spot overall in June 2024, the first solo human to hold #1 since PewDiePie. Last summer he was clearing roughly one million new subscribers every three to four days. 40% of his audience is between 13 and 17, per Tubefilter, and another 20% is between 18 and 24.

Why does this matter for creators?

Audience is no longer the bottleneck. A 27-year-old from a small Carolina town just commanded more subscribers than the population of the United States, with zero gatekeepers and a global footprint built channel by channel. That is the death of the legacy distribution moat, broadcast in one data point. Every cable exec who shrugged off YouTube as a "kids platform" just watched a solo creator pass them in reach by an order of magnitude.

What that does to the working creator math is the part nobody on a corporate distribution stack wants to say out loud. The constraint moves from "can I get seen?" to "do the rails underneath my business actually let me keep the money?" At MrBeast scale, every percentage point a platform takes off the top compounds into millions. At every other scale, it compounds into rent.

"The thing is, these metrics, whether it's views or subscribers, I have more than I could have ever imagined I would have as a younger kid."

Jimmy Donaldson, Creator, MrBeast, to Dexerto

Where does this go from here?

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan posted a personal congratulations and shipped Donaldson a custom play button. The platform's incentive is obvious. As long as one creator can siphon this much attention into one feed, YouTube's distribution dominance gets harder to dislodge. The next milestone is the first individual to hit 1 billion subs, and at his current pace, that's a 2027-2028 conversation.

Donaldson himself has stopped pretending the number means anything in isolation. On Dexerto, he said that 500 million, 5 million, or five thousand "doesn't really matter as much to me anymore." What matters, he told the outlet, is making videos people love. That's the line every working creator will spend the next decade testing against their own business.

What does Fanvault think?

Fanvault's read is that this is the loudest possible signal that the next decade of platform competition isn't a fight over reach. It's a fight over who refuses to tax success. Fanvault charges 8% per transaction so creators keep 92%, roughly half of what Fanvue takes (15%) and less than half of what Fanfix charges (~20%).

At MrBeast scale, the fee gap is the difference between a yacht and a fleet. At the scale of the creator who just shipped their first paid post, it's the difference between rent and eviction. Distribution is solved. The fight from here is over the cap table on every transaction.

Half a billion subscribers is the new ceiling. The floor that matters now is what actually hits the creator's bank account when they make the sale.