We've been talking a lot about scams, yesterday I talked about scam in smart contracts and crypto including the scams we see on the Hive chain, but what about the scams we see everyday but don't even consider them as such?
One of them is the YouTuber MRBEAST. The system is built on trust and dopamine hit. A lot of people loves watching videos that feels satisfying or gives you this "aha" feeling.
We can argue that there are lots of people who have built social media presence and monetization by doing giveaways, but there's something that makes MRBEAST very different, and I'll tell you why.........Rhis is the Incredible SCAM that a lot of people don't even know.
Money is attention
He started with giving random people cash money and then posting them on YouTube. This was more believable, but he graduated to asking people to do bizarre things for huge sums of money.
Again, the higher the amount, the more the attraction. For example, no one will watch a video that says "I gave a stranger 5$ for eating a yoghurt" but you see, switch that title to say $20,000 instead of $5. It's a bait title, almost everyone will click.
People wants to know why a random stranger gets such an amount of money for doing something that doesn't even pose any crazy challenges to their health or life, because let's face it, even though we know anyone can be lucky to make great money with little efforts, it's also difficult for a random rich man to gift people money just because they'll be posting these videos across their monetized Chanmel.
The psychology behind it
You see, this guy understands the psychology of social media monetization. This is why giveaway posts gather more interactions, while intellectual contents might struggle.
Online social media content is changing. A lot people are tweaking their content format to feed others a sort of dopamine satisfaction, and if you're not treating social media monetization like a business where you need to initially invest money, then you'll have to depend on your ability to be creative to make money. MRBEAST didn't choose the later, he went for the former.
While his content is a based on a reality TV show of a sort, the dark psychology is giving people content that appeals to their fantasy, which is the giveaway content, granted, the challenges are great, and the whole concept is decent, but the endgame is always the money, and they're not just giving away money, they're giving away money that's unreal which sometimes gets people to always beg in the comments section.
People asking for financial assistance to pay their medical bills, or things like that, and that's because the fantasy of that money feels and seems too incredible and that's the concept of the whole scam.
Now I'm not actually saying they don't do actual giveaways, I'm just saying the money doesn't go out as we expect, the money sometimes is recycled back to them, and when it does, they can still make a lot of money off platforms like YouTube, which means they can significantly cover cost of production, keeping a lot of the giveaway Money back into their pocket while serving the audience what they exactly want them to see or watch.
Next step: Become too big for the algorithm
Also, MRBEAST has become too big on YouTube so much that a lot of contents are actually against the YouTube policies, but YouTube will mostly not do much because he's definitely top 5 content creator on YouTube that pulls the biggest views.
Social media content money is really not difficult. You just have to understand human psychology, have a bit of money to invest, copy the existing patterns that's there and scale monetization.
A few years back, I watched a few of his videos and some others videos of building a school, or something that has to do with water in a rural African country, and I saw a lot of people bashing him about the realism of that project.
So whether or not people likes the concept or the idea, or if he's lying or not, the truth is, that the people will watch regardless, because money and lifestyle content is like a drug in one's system, and even people who hates it are going to watch.
We've seen people like him, come and go, but he's still here and the more ludicrous and outrageous the challenges and giveaways become, the more people are going to be watching.