MrBeast’s main YouTube channel added 117 million subscribers in 2025, the largest single-year subscriber gain in YouTube’s history, according to data published by fan-run analytics account MrBeast Statistics. 

The account’s February 2026 analysis attributes a major portion of that growth to a sustained advertising campaign operated by CreatorGlobal, the creator’s multi-language audio dubbing company, through Google’s Ad Transparency Center.

The channel’s 117 million subscriber gain outpaced the second-fastest-growing channel of 2025, KIMPRO, by 67 million subscribers. MrBeast gained 2.36 times as many subscribers as the second-place channel, the third time in YouTube’s history that the fastest-growing channel of the year doubled the second-place channel’s total.

Scale and Structure of the Ad Campaign

CreatorGlobal ran 428 total ads across 2025 under its Google Ads profiles, with advertising active in every month of the year. India accounted for roughly 40% of all ads run, while Indonesia and Vietnam together made up approximately another 40%. Thailand and a small number of other markets composed the remaining 20%.

July was the campaign’s most active month. CreatorGlobal launched 256 ads that month, including 203 within a 48-hour window on July 8 and 9, targeting only India, Indonesia, and Vietnam. October saw the second-highest number of new ads launched and the highest number of ads ended in a single month, with 176 ads concluding their runs. The campaign reached its single-day peak on October 16, when 298 unique ads ran simultaneously.

Of the 428 ads launched in 2025, 278 ended before the year’s close, while 150 remained active into 2026. The ads used 98 unique videos, 90 of which were YouTube Shorts and 8 of which were long-form content. That figure represents 61% of the 148 Shorts published on the main MrBeast channel as of year-end.

Key Ads and Their Impact on Subscriber Growth

The analysis identifies several Shorts as the most impactful drivers of subscriber growth when run as ads. “Subscribe For An iPhone,” a 17-second Short promoting a 1,000-iPhone giveaway for new subscribers, launched as an ad on approximately January 25 in India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Turkey, and Thailand, and ran continuously through October 4. During its peak, the video consistently generated over 100,000 likes per day. When ads were paused briefly in April, the channel’s daily growth dropped from approximately 220,000-230,000 subscribers per day to around 120,000, before recovering once ads resumed.

“Can I Teach a Penguin To Subscribe?”, a 9-second Short uploaded May 31, began running as an ad on June 3 across seven instances in India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Turkey. The Short coincided with the channel reaching 400 million subscribers and was the 10th-most-viewed Short on the channel at the time of analysis.

In late August, MrBeast published “1 Subscriber = 1 Penny Donated,” a Short tied to TeamWater, a charity initiative co-led by MrBeast and Mark Rober that raised $40 million in one month for global clean water access. The Short gained 68 million views and 3 million likes in its first 24 hours. It ran as an ad under a separate Google Ads account, BFA Non-Billable Test Profile, through approximately September 30. 

CreatorGlobal then launched 7 additional instances of the Short on October 1, running in India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and several Arabic-speaking markets. September’s subscriber growth spike, visible in the analysis’s daily data, aligns closely with the Short’s ad run.

India Subscriber Growth and Geographic Strategy

YouTube’s “2025 Global Culture and Trends Report,” cited in the analysis, states that MrBeast gained 47 million Indian subscribers in 2025. The analysis notes this figure exceeds the total number of subscribers T-Series (India’s most-subscribed YouTube channel) gained during its own best year for subscriber growth. Indian subscribers now represent more than 10 percent of MrBeast’s total subscriber base.

The ads targeting India ran in multiple regional languages, including Hindi, Telugu, Punjabi, Tamil, and Marathi. CreatorGlobal is the entity that provides multi-language audio dubbing for the channels, enabling localized ad delivery at scale. Indonesia received the most subscribers from any single country, though an exact figure was not available in the source data.

Advertising as a Broader YouTube Growth Strategy

The analysis observes that advertising-fueled subscriber growth became more prevalent across YouTube in 2025. 

Of the three channels that outpaced MrBeast in a given month of subscriber growth, the analysis confirms that at least two (“Masters of Prophecy” and “The Game Awards”) used advertising. “Masters of Prophecy,” an AI music channel, finished as the fourth fastest-growing channel on YouTube for the full year. Other advertising-assisted channels in YouTube’s top 50 fastest-growing list for 2025 included Bispo Bruno Leonardo (#7), Toyota GAZOO Racing (#21), and 유창조 You Chang Jo (#30).

The analysis also notes the impact of a platform-wide deceleration in subscriber growth, which it refers to as “The Flattening,” stemming from changes to YouTube’s homepage algorithm and its approach to recommending older Shorts. “The Flattening” began affecting channels across the platform around September 2025, though its effect on MrBeast’s channel was partially masked during that period by the TeamWater Short’s performance.

As of the analysis’s publication date, roughly 150 ads remained active across CreatorGlobal’s two Google Ads profiles. A new Short, “Subscribe for an iPhone,” published on January 13, 2026, began running as an ad on the day of its release and reached 1 billion views by February 21, 2026, 39 days after upload.

Image source: @MrBeast_Stats