Ronaldo, Brady Among Athletes Riding MrBeast’s YouTube Success

Some of the world’s top athletes are looking to Jimmy Donaldson, known online as MrBeast, to build their social media presence, particularly on YouTube.

Donaldson—who has more than 334 million YouTube subscribers, the most on the platform—posted a video on Saturday titled “Beat Ronaldo, Win $1,000,000” featuring top sports stars across several sports: Cristiano Ronaldo, Tom Brady, Noah Lyles, Bryce Harper, and Bryson DeChambeau. The video has amassed more than 75 million views as of 2 p.m. ET on Dec. 2.

The YouTuber pitted the star athletes in exhibition competitions with non-professionals for a $100,000 prize. The prize would go to a charity if the professionals won. The non-pros, who ranged from a high school football player to TikTok star Eric Justice Befumo, known as Big Justice, were given an advantage to even the playing field. 

But as seen from the title, Ronaldo was the main attraction, and Donaldson called him “the most popular person I’ve ever had in a video.” The soccer superstar donned the jersey of Al Nassr FC, but lost a $1 million shootout to a fan named Khalid at Al-Awwal Park in Saudi Arabia. 

The 39-year-old soccer legend, who is the most-followed person on Instagram, launched his YouTube account in August and has already amassed 70 million subscribers. He posted a video with Donaldson on his account on Nov. 21 that broke 50 million views and is his second-most-watched video. He posted another video with Donaldson on Nov. 30 that showed the two facing off in a soccer exhibition and is his fifth-most-watched video with more than 21.5 million views.

Of the athletes featured in Donaldson’s video, DeChambeau has the largest YouTube following with more than 1.63 million subscribers. Lyles and Brady each have more than 200,000, while Harper does not have a personal channel. Lyles also featured MrBeast and IShowSpeed, another popular streamer, on one of his most viewed videos, while DeChambeau’s latest video was with Brady.