Top 10 highest-paid YouTubers 2022
Image Credit: Forbes
Collectively pulling in around $300 million, Forbes list the YouTube stars who earned the most amount of money in 2021.
Forbes latest “Highest-Paid YouTube Stars” details the YouTubers who collectively earned roughly $300 million, up 40% from a year earlier. This increase comes largely from increased views and therefore ad revenue. There are more people on YouTube than ever before, with over two billion users, representing an increase of 40% in five years. Most of the content creators below earned around half of their revenue from ad revenue on YouTube, while the rest comes from sources like branded merchandise, podcasts, NFTs, and other platforms like Twitch, Snap and Facebook.
Jimmy Donaldson, known on YouTube as MrBeast comes in at number one, with record earnings. Accumulating double the amount of views from last year, with over 10 billion views, the 23 year old brought in $54 million in 2021, more than any other YouTuber ever. MrBeast’s channel features super-sized stunts, from being buried alive for 50 hours, offering $10,000 to anyone willing to sit in a bathtub full of snakes, to hosting his own version of Squid Game, building replicas of the Netflix show’s set. At $54 billion, Jimmy Donaldson sits in the Top 40 of Forbes Celebrity 100, earning more in 2021 than stars across entertainment such as Billie Eilish, Kim Kardashian, Angelina Jolie and BTS.
MrBeast is followed by Jake Paul in second place, despite past scandals, at $45 million. Markiplier comes in at number three, with $38 million. Both also feature in Celebrity 100, with a cutoff of $35 million. This clearly shows the line between digital stars and “traditional” stars continuing to blur.
This data is based on earnings between January 1 and December 31, 2021. Figures are prior to deductions such as tax, and fees for agents, managers and lawyers. The estimates come from data provided by Captiv8, SocialBlade, Pollstar and industry insiders.
The bios below comes from Forbes. See the full article here. The Up, Down and Returns listed beside earnings are based on the previous list from Forbes, which covered the highest-paid YouTube stars between June 2019 and June 2020.
For Forbes’ list of the highest-earnin TikTok stars in 2021, click here.
Jimmy Donaldson
$54 million – Up
Thanks to that surge in views, his 2021 payday is almost double what last year’s No. 1 brought in. (That would be the $29.5 million brought in by Ryan Kaji, who slips to No. 7.) Another attention-grabbing project from 2021: MrBeast Burger, an app and menu that lets fans order MrBeast-branded meals from 1,600 restaurants across the country that have partnered with him to fulfill the orders. MrBeast handles the marketing, pushing the burgers at his nearly 90 million YouTube subscribers. He and the restaurants then split the profits from the orders. So far, the operation has sold 5 million sandwiches.
$45 million – Returns
Look who’s baaack: Paul returns to this list—he last made it in 2018 with $21.5 million in earnings—largely on the strength of his boxing earnings. He fought three well-publicized bouts last year with a pair of MMA fighters: one match with Ben Askren, two with Tyron Woodley. (Paul won them all.) In many ways, boxing, a sport long populated by contentious stars, is a natural fit for Paul, himself no stranger to controversy. He had been one of YouTube’s most popular names until his brother Logan posted a December 2017 video filmed in a Japanese forest grimly famous as a suicide spot. Fans hated it—deeming it distinctly in poor taste—and the backlash hit both Paul brothers. Their sponsors cut them, and YouTube demonetized them. Now, they can earn off YouTube ads again, but Jake posts less frequently than he once did, using the site mostly to market his boxing career, which now accounts for nearly 90% of his earnings.
Mark Edward Fischbach
$38 million – Up
Few social media stars can move merch like Markiplier, who saw especially strong sales from the T-shirts, hoodies and other items tied to his Unus Annus series, the main reason his earnings have nearly doubled from our previous list. (Those Unus Annus videos were a collaboration with fellow YouTuber Ethan Nestor-Darling and ran on Markiplier’s YouTube channel starting in 2019. A year later, Markiplier deliberately deleted them all.) Next, Markiplier hopes to remake himself as a TV star. In 2021, he filmed a television adaptation of The Edge of Sleep, a post-apocalyptic thriller he initially dramatized as a podcast in 2019; the TV project still needs a home, and he hopes to sell the series to a company like Netflix or Hulu later this year. Markiplier remains a popular YouTube fixture (31 million subscribers), having first cemented his fame by recording himself playing things like Five Nights at Freddy’s, a video game about a haunted pizza place.
Rhett James McLaughlin and Charles Lincoln “Link” Neal III
$30 million – Up
What started as the duo hosting a nerdy daily talk show, Good Mythical Morning, has grown into something of an empire with spinoffs and brand extensions, boosting their views and earnings on YouTube. One of their most successful efforts: Mythical Kitchen, a cooking series with a separate host, Josh Scherer. The two-year-old show already has 1.8 million subscribers on YouTube. Another initiative is their Mythical Accelerator fund through which they intend to invest $5 million in other YouTubers. (They made their first deal in 2021, contributing an undisclosed sum to up-and-comer Jarvis Johnson.) And in October, they satisfied a longtime fan request to drop their family-friendly act, hosting a two-hour, decidedly R-rated livestream, an event to which they sold 70,000 tickets for as much as $50 a pop.
Nathan Johnson Graham
$28.5 million – New
Unspeakable can’t shut up about Minecraft, the pixelated video game that’s now a childhood staple. Over 20 million people subscribe to his four YouTube channels, where he posts videos of himself playing Minecraft and other games. In other clips, he does things like fill a room with live alligators. Born in Houston as Nathan Graham, he has posted steadily on YouTube for the past decade. Last year, Unspeakable sold off his catalog of YouTube videos to Spotter last year, betting that he can use the lump sum to grow his business more quickly rather than wait for the videos to accrue ad revenue. (Spotter is now one of the largest independent owners of YouTube content, making several deals like the one for Unspeakable’s back catalog in recent years.) In the meantime, the Spotter money was at least enough to help Unspeakable debut here.
Anastasia Radzinskaya
$28 million – Up
Nastya also did a Spotter deal last year, selling the rights to her old YouTube videos to Spotter for cash upfront while retaining the rights to any new videos she puts up. The seven year old, who immigrated from Russia with her parents, has drawn in 87.5 million subscribers to her Like Nastya channel, where she chronicles her life in prosaic installments. (Top hits from 2021: videos about decorating Halloween cupcakes and about spending time with her best friends, Evelyn and Adrian.) Along with the Spotter money, she and her corporate minders have busily added other brand extensions, including a merchandise line and a NFT collection.
Ryan Kaji
$27 million – Down
Ryan started on YouTube at the tender age of 4, reviewing and playing with toys. Now 10, his parents and the others guarding his business interests—that includes former Disney executive Chris Williams—are increasingly focused on keeping his brand alive as he ages out of playtime. The answer, they hope, may be the animated characters that costar with Ryan. (They’ve made some progress. One such character, Red Titan, a child superhero with a crimson cape and a passing resemblance to Ryan, has become well known enough to appear as a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon for the past two years.) For now, his main YouTube channel, Ryan’s World, maintains 31 million subscribers and an enormous line of branded merchandise and toys sold at big-box retailers like Target and Walmart.
Coby Cotton, Cory Cotton, Garrett Hilbert, Cody Jones and Tyler Toney
$20 million – Down
If it seems dangerous to you, it is gold for this sports-comedy fivesome (twins Coby and Cory Cotton, Garrett Hilbert, Cody Jones and Tyler Toney). Their videos are filled with things like someone bench-pressing 405 pounds underwater and walking on a biplane’s wings mid flight. What’s better than watching these stunts online? Seeing them up close and personal: The group will do their third live tour this summer in 24 cities. And for the bravest of heart at home, Dude Perfect last year published 101 Tricks, Tips, and Cool Stuff, a 250-page, photo-filled book complete with step-by-step instructions.
$18 million – Returns
Like his brother Jake, Logan comes back to this list after a 2017 scandal pushed both siblings off. And like Jake, Logan has pivoted toward boxing. He had a bout last June against former world champion Floyd Mayweather, which, as an exhibition fight, had no official winner. As Logan continues to rehab his image, he had one of the first celebrity NFT releases with a $5 million sale last February, while his podcast, Impaulsive, has generated over 100 million YouTube views over the past year.
Preston Arsement
$16 million – Down
Preston runs several YouTube channels, but the name of his most popular one, PrestonPlayz, says all you really need to know about him: The guy plays a lot of video games, mostly Minecraft. Nearly 12 million people subscribe to that four-year-old channel, which he has done a good job of keeping topical: In one of his most recent videos, he built a playable Minecraft version of the challenges from Squid Game.