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Hello and welcome to USA Today is the excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Sunday, October 12, 2025.

If you spend any time on YouTube and most of us do, then you've probably watched or at least

heard of Mr. Beast. Last check, he had 444 million subscribers with videos that routinely get hundreds of millions of views.

Mr. Beast is literally at the top of the YouTube food chain,

but off-platform, one of his ventures appears to have stalled out.

In 2022, he announced a partnership with

East Carolina University to offer a credentialing program to help teach students how to create

captivating money-making content. So what happened to it? USA Today investigative reporter,

Chris Quintana, went looking for answers. It's good to have you on, Chris.

Thank you so much for having me. I mentioned Mr. Beast's YouTube subscriber count. In terms of

creation, how has he achieved such an astonishing level of mass appeal? That is a great question,

and, you know, different people will tell you different things. But I think it

comes back to this sort of extreme philanthropy approach that he has, right? He, in the early days,

Mr. Beast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, he would just walk around and like give people

huge amounts of money, but felt to people life-changing amounts of money. And so that has been

part of his bread and butter.

As he's gotten more famous, he's created bigger and wider videos. There's a lot of explosions.

There's a lot of challenges. And he even has an Amazon show now where a lot of people say it feels reminiscent to squid games, which is if you ever seen that, it's a lot of high-profile challenges.

And, yeah, so he's a big personality.

Does Mr. Bess have a personal tie to East Carolina University?

...