Thoughts
It is absolutely striking to compare Mr. Beast with Improv Everywhere.
So I've been super antisocial the last day or so, and I've been binge watching Mr. Beast. I don't like and am not subscribed to Mr. Beast, but some of his prompts, his ideas, are really good. The video style just ends up being more of "Mr. Beast REACTS to stranger that he gave $100" than anything else. And I don't enjoy those reaction-style videos, where a large portion of the content is really the emotional response of Jimmy and Chandler and Tyler, more so than content about what's going on. To me as a viewer, I don't care about the amount of money involved; the money is only there to elicit an emotional response from the people in the video.
(Background for Improv Everywhere. They peaked in fricking 2008, 12 years ago, with a 37M view video. Sure, Mr. Beast gets millions of views on every video, but to get that many views 12 years ago is insanity. The iPhone had come out less than a year ago; Twitter less than two. People didn't have Youtube accounts so the video had like a handful of likes. They didn't build a dedicated audience, because that's something people didn't know how to do on Youtube in 2008.)
On the other hand, Improv Everywhere does some similar prompts. They don't do giveaways. They do public skits/pranks but some portion of their content is the other people in public that are reacting to their stunt. But they very intentionally do not have a "face." If you dig through their stuff you find the guy that leads it at the beginning of most of their videos, but I don't know his name, and they cut all prep time out of some of the more recent ones. Since the stunt isn't giveaway-style, their stunts create audio/visual contrast to the normal. This gives you more time to react to it personally, and imagine what's like to be there. Your experience is much closer to the experience of someone randomly on the street, with the notable exception that you know that it's staged.
Improv Everywhere treats their work like art. Their goal is to do a performance, whereas Mr. Beast is running a gameshow. If Mr. Beast treated his videos like IE does, he and his friends wouldn't have any lines, it would just be classical music over the reaction of someone getting money. I'm not trying to say that's why Mr. Beast is successful—Youtube success is a different question to content-style. I think it's interesting to compare the content of these channels that have similar success in different time periods.