Meet the YouTubers who are raking the cash – as Mr Beast turns down a €1billion deal

In fact, just last week, the world’s biggest YouTuber revealed he had turned down a $1 billion offer for his entire business portfolio.

MrBeast, aka Jimmy Donaldson, earned $54m in 2021 from YouTube alone, making him the number earner on the planet.

His 105 million subscribers means his videos regularly pull in tens of millions of views, so he is property gold for advertisers.

He’s not the only one coining it in from the video channel. Toy testers, pranksters, MMA fighters and comedians all feature in this list. There’s even an Offaly man pulling in tens of millions from playing video games.

Mr Beast

The king of YouTube first went viral for counting to 100,000 back in 2017 but now keeps his subscribers enthralled with his elaborate over the top stunts (his Squid Game video has 290 million views as of this week) charitable fundraisers and his life-changing cash prizes for the lucky contestants who take part.

He is not motivated by making money (clearly as he turned down $1bn), so he tends to give it away. He gives away houses, super cars and giant wads of cash away to random strangers or stubborn contestants on his videos. It is all harmless fun and compared to most of the egos in our list. He never wants to be the star of the show. Which makes him even more likeable and bankable.

Logan Paul

Earning $18m in 2021 alone from YouTube, Logan has managed to earn even more from his other business ventures away from the video platform. Paul is not just limiting himself to work in front of the camera. In 2021, he released an NFT, hosted a popular podcast on YouTube, and earned close to $50m from a shadow boxing match against Floyd Mayweather.

Ryan Kaji

Ryan Kaji (aka Ryan’s World) proves you don’t have to have a specific set of skills to become one of the world’s biggest YouTube earners. The 10 year old just needed clever parents and bucket loads of personality. Plus it helped that he was first out of the gate on the whole ‘toy testing video’ content. Despite being the 7th biggest earner in 2021 he was actually top of the pile the previous year. He won’t be too disappointed though as he still made $27m between January and December 2021. He now has his own TV show on Nick Jr so while he is slipping down the rankings he is not going anywhere soon.

• Preston Arsement

Preston Arsement started out on YouTube nearly ten years ago years ago with the channel PrestonPlayz. His earliest content featured various video games, but had a special focus on Minecraft. He has since rebranded the channel under just his first name and created a spin-off PrestonPlayz channel that exclusively publishes Minecraft videos.

Now his primary channel features challenge and competition videos, with snappy titles like ‘Bulletproof Glass vs World’s Strongest Man’ and ‘I Survived 24 Hours in a Vending Machine’. He has 20m subscribers on there while his Minecraft channel has another 12m.

• DUDE PERFECT

Plenty of YouTubers get views by pulling off ridiculous stunts, but Dude Perfect helped to perfect the trend. Their 58.3 million subscribers tune in to see the team take on amazing feats and bizarre world record challenges.

The channel now also ventures into comedy skits from time to time, but most of the videos are dedicated to athletic challenges so out-there that you can hardly call them sports. The team of five earned $20 million from their videos in 2021 but also earn from live tours and book releases.

• Nastya

Anastasia Radzinskaya, known as Nastya by fans of her channel Like Nastya, is just eight years old, but she’s already one of the most popular content creators that YouTube has ever seen.

In 2020, Bloomberg reported her various channels (which repost her videos dubbed into nine different languages for audiences all around the world) pull in 100 million views every single day.

Her most popular video has over 900 million views which is why Spotter signed a deal with Nastya’s family in 2021 to buy the rights to her old videos. The deal helped earn Nastya more than $28m last year alone.

• JackSepticEye

Irishman Sean William McLoughlin is in a league of his own when it comes to Irish content creators.

Officially he is one of the highest paid vloggers in the world. The 32-year-old now lives in England and has 28.8 million subscribers and tens of millions in the bank.

Six years ago, he was chosen as one of the ten finalists in PewDiePie’s shout out competition and the Offaly man went from 2,500 subscribers to 15,000 in just four days.

He then became one of the platform’s most consistent creators, uploading two videos a day for years.

While he is not as frequent these days, he is still one of the most bankable with nearly 15 billion views in total.

• Jake Paul

Yep, the other one is here too. The younger brother of Logan has more than 20 million subscribers on YouTube, and he was the second highest paid YouTube star in 2021.

Paul rose to fame on Vine, but these days he advertises his career as a boxer — a change of focus that’s been incredibly lucrative.

He may have earned $45m in 2021 but there is an argument to be made that Paul isn’t really a YouTuber any more, at least not full time.

• RHETT AND LINK

In their YouTube bio, Rhett and Link describe themselves as “two guys who are only getting older, trying our best to maintain our childhood friendship via filming each other on various adventures.”

Their adventures have been entertaining people for over a decade now, ever since the friends started their daily YouTube show ‘Good Mythical Morning’, which now has 17.8 million subscribers.

Rhett and Link stand out on this list because their talk-show format is wildly different from everything else here. But that difference didn’t stop them from earning $30m in 2021 alone.

• Markiplier

Markiplier is another YouTuber who rose to fame playing video games and got his start on by posting videos of himself playing popular horror titles like Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Penumbra, and Five Nights at Freddy’s.

Markiplier’s choice of games and sense of humour turned him into a major star.

His channel currently has 33.7 million subscribers as he branches out to do a number of other video projects, including interactive films and his wildly popular Unus Annus channel.

Much of his earnings come from sales of t-shirts and other merchandise, but everything that Markiplier does is supported by his loyal YouTube audience.