Former MrBeast manager Reed Duchscher explains how to find fame on TikTok, and make money on YouTube

You have heard of MrBeast. You have likely not heard of Reed Duchscher, who helped YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson become MrBeast, the king of YouTubeby managing him for six years.

Donaldson and Duchscher split up in 2024but Duchscher works with lots of other high-profile internet personalities, including live-streamers Kai Cenat and Hasan Pikervia his Night management firm. Now Duchscher has raised $70 million to expand Night and acquire other companies.

Duchscher says it is getting harder and harder to hatch giant internet personalities — in part because platforms like YouTube and TikTok would prefer to have lots of creators who reach lots of people rather than contend with a smaller group of creators who reach everyone.

I talked to Duchscher about how the creator economy is evolving and the tensions between creators and platforms on my Channels podcast. The following are edited excerpts from our conversation.

Peter Kafka: You’ve said we may not get another MrBeast — a single content creator that dominates a platform. Why?

Reed Duchscher: There’s a few things I’ve seen shift over the last couple of years. One is that the platforms don’t want people to break through: The algorithms on TikTok and YouTube and Instagram now put you in this little lane of content that they know you care about, and they keep feeding you that content.

Pre-COVID, we would go on TikTok, and a lot of people would see Addison Rae videos, Charli D'Amelio videos. It was getting fed to the whole ecosystem. Now if you go on TikTok, you see your very small lane of content that interests you.

So that’s one challenge. The platforms would rather have a middle tier of creators, with 5 to 10 million followers — they would rather have that be enormous — than have a few people break through.

You think this is intentional on the part of platforms? I understand them wanting to tune the algorithm so it gives me exactly what I want. That’s different than saying “We don’t want another MrBeast,” who has enormous power, which is what you’re suggesting.

I am suggesting both.

You want the algorithms to be as good as possible at keeping high session time. If you feed people exactly what they want, the session time goes up.

But we’ve seen “adpocalypses” happen — we’ve seen PewDiePie affect the advertising rate of all of YouTube by saying something and then people pull out YouTube ads.

That is an existential threat [to the platforms]. And when you have individuals that have a lot of power and leverage over platforms, those things can happen.

Which platforms are you telling your talent to work on if they want to reach people? And which one are you telling them to go make money on?

It was much different a year and a half ago. Now everyone has short-form content, which really acts as the tip of the spear in distribution.

Short-form content is easy to get a high amount of impressions on. It gets fed to a lot of people, and things can go viral: It doesn’t matter if you have two followers or 200,000 followers, a video that is good and has high retention can go viral on TikTok.

We would always tell people: Use TikTok as a discoverability mechanism. But now we have Reels and YouTube Shorts. Every platform has copied short-form, so discoverability is really good across every social platform.

But where you make money is substantially different. YouTube is still the gold standard for monetizing a creator’s career.

Because they’re still the only big platform that routinely shares revenue with creators.

Yeah. And with long-form videos, you can run multiple ad units: You can place ads every minute, every two minutes, every three minutes.

I don’t want to glaze them too hard, but YouTube has been at the forefront of allowing creators to make money for the last decade. They have been very creator-first in how they’ve handled the platform and the products they launch.

Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat have not figured that out. And none of them have really figured out long-form video.

YouTube in particular is really pushing people to make longer stuff, in part because people are consuming tons of YouTube on TV sets. But they’re also pushing creators to make short-form stuff for Shorts, their TikTok clone. How do you do both?

I tell creators that YouTube Shorts is good for getting your content seen by a wide variety of people. When you make long-form videos, you have to have a high click-through rate and a high retention for that video to get seen.

But it’s harder to break through with a long-form video. It’s much easier to break through the noise with a short-form video, but they just don’t monetize remotely as well as the long-form videos.

How do you balance that? It seems like they’re really different products.

[Make] two native videos. You post a long-form, and maybe if you are Theo Vaughn or another podcaster, there may be clips that you can post out from that long-form video. But the majority of creators have to have two different strategies: You make a long-form video, and then you have all your creative ideas that make native short-form videos.

That sounds exhausting.

It’s a hard career. It’s not for everyone.

I’ve heard people say creators should spend less time on short-form because it’s harder to make money doing that. And that they should focus on live-streaming, like Hasan Piker and Kai Cenatwho are making content for six, seven, eight hours at a pop. But very few people can actually do that successfully.

It’s very hard to be on live eight hours a day. But for a Kai or a Hasan, [the upside is that] the internet creates clips for them. When you go on TikTok and YouTube Shorts, you’ll see a lot of Kai or Hasan content that is just organically clipped by the ecosystem of the internet.

Fans, or people who want to make moneyor both, say, “I’m going to take this free content that Hasan Piker’s made. I’m going to edit it myself and turn that into a clip that could at least generate more attention for Hasan Piker, and maybe money for me.”

And we don’t take those down. We usually let them be up. We are better off allowing the internet to make amazing videos of clipped content that Kai and Hasan are making on Twitch than us doing it.

And it’s worked. A lot of people see Kai for the first time through a clip that we didn’t make.

It’s the internet doing free labor and promotion.

Well, they do make money. You can monetize short-form clips. It’s just that the relative [ad rates] for those videos is way lower than on a long-form video.

But these clippers are making a decent amount of money.

Are there any platforms that people are overlooking today that you think are interesting for an aspiring creator?

Twitch is so underutilized and monetized. I understand the difficulty of livestreaming and being on. And I still feel like Twitch needs to continue to expand into other offerings outside of gaming and IRL. But there’s a lot of ground to be gained on Twitch. It’s not as noisy as all the other platforms are.

I interviewed Twitch CEO Dan Clancy last year, and one of my takeaways was that maybe livestreaming is always going to be for a relatively niche audience. During the pandemic, we saw Facebook and YouTube go after Twitch, and try to build their own livestream operations. They basically walked away from it, which maybe is an indicator that this stuff just doesn’t have that huge of an audience.

You’re probably right. The audience is 14-to-25 year olds and it hasn’t grown. But if you just go back in time, 10 years ago, YouTube was predominantly kids. And they’ve done a good job of widening out. My parents now can go on YouTube and find content that they enjoy.

Live is a little more challenging. I just think that Twitch needs to figure out how they widen out.

Give me a prediction for 2026.

In 2026, I don’t think AI fundamentally changes any way that we watch or make content. I don’t think AI movies are coming anytime soon. I don’t think AI animation is coming anytime soon.

I know this is a big worry of [Hollywood]. I am just still such a bear and I’m not optimistic about anything going on in AI as it relates to content media.

Because AI isn’t good enough?

Not even close.

Three years, five years from now?

Adoption takes way longer than people think. Over the next two to three years, it’s a very low likelihood that this is going to affect what we do.

I think animation will be the first, and hopefully the animation studios figure out how to utilize the platforms that allow them to make things cheaper.

But I see a lot of this doom and gloom about AI in media, and I just don’t feel that at all. I think we’re still so far away.