MrBeast's Neymar vs Ronaldo Challenge: How Recreating Viral Videos Gets 70M Views in 3 Days!

In November 2024, Jimmy Donaldson—better known as MrBeast—released a video titled “Beat Ronaldo, Win $1,000,000,” featuring Cristiano Ronaldo in a series of challenges.

The video was an instant juggernaut, racking up 279 million views, 7.7 million likes, and 114,921 comments.

Five months later, on May 24, 2025, he released a follow-up titled “Beat Neymar, Win $500,000,” swapping Ronaldo for Neymar and adjusting the prize. The result? Another runaway hit—70 million views, 2.4 million likes, and 60,633 comments in just three days, still holding the #5 spot on YouTube’s Trending list at the time of writing.

Same format. Same stakes. Different footballer. MrBeast didn’t innovate; he iterated. And it worked—again.

MrBeast Doubled Down Because the Data Said So

This isn’t creative laziness. It’s strategic repetition.

The logic is simple, and as Miquel Castany put it on X: “If a video went viral once, it should go viral twice.”

MrBeast saw a format that brought in hundreds of millions of views, and rather than chase a new gimmick, he reused the same one with small, high-impact variations.

In this case, the change was minimal: substitute Neymar for Ronaldo, reduce the cash prize from $1 million to $500,000, and keep everything else intact. The audience didn’t mind. If anything, they rewarded the familiarity.

It’s not just about views. This kind of repetition gives creators and brands a second chance to dominate cultural attention without starting from zero. For creators with massive reach (398 million subscribers) like MrBeast, that means adding another hundred million to the scoreboard with minimal risk.

Turning Viral One-Offs Into Repeatable Video Series

This approach isn’t new. David Park from Jenni AI used the same concept to build a revenue-generating machine for a completely different audience. Park leaned into a strategy he calls milking a viral video for all it’s worth—not by reposting the same clip, but by creating a light series with minor variations.

The blueprint looks like this:

• Identify a viral hit.

• Stop pushing content that doesn’t convert.

• Recreate the viral format with subtle changes.

People enjoy familiar structures. They don’t want constant novelty—they want reliable entertainment, lightly refreshed.

For Jenni AI, this meant producing a series around the theme “Point of view: you have a paper due.” The video always ended the same way—someone rushing to use Jenni AI to finish an essay—but the beginning changed each time. Sometimes the person was asleep, other times walking a dog, or sitting in a restaurant. Same payoff, different setup.

They ran this variation twice a week for six months. The results? Hundreds of millions of views, tens of thousands of paying users, tens of thousands of paid users, and over half a million dollars in revenue.

Heck, it made over $712,278 in revenue in the past 30 days alone, with lifetime revenue now crossing $12 million.

Familiarity Is a Feature, Not a Flaw

If this all feels formulaic, that’s the point. MrBeast isn’t just reusing a successful idea—he’s tapping into a basic truth about human behavior. As Tony Robbins said in a Tom Bilyeu interview, “Humans love certainty and uncertainty. But you can't be too much uncertain.” People crave structure, patterns, and things they already know how to enjoy.

Hollywood has known this for decades. Franchises like Fast & Furious, Mission: Impossible, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe survive on familiarity. Even in 2024, only one of the top 10 worldwide box office hits wasn’t a sequel.

The entertainment economy runs on repeated success, not novelty. You don’t need a brand-new idea every time. You just need a proven one that still works.

Tactics to Squeeze the Most Out of a Viral Hit

For creators or marketers looking to extract more value from a single viral concept, the formula is accessible—though often underutilized:

• Republish it on multiple accounts to reach different audiences.

• Translate or localize for non-English-speaking regions.

• License or syndicate it to meme pages or reposters as the content ages.

• Space out variations to maintain freshness while staying consistent.

MrBeast can’t publish the same video weekly on his main channel without exhausting his 398+ million subscribers. But on his smaller channels or TikTok accounts, he can run high-volume variations with more frequency and less risk.

This strategy isn’t just about staying viral. It’s about being efficient. If you have something that works, you owe it to yourself—or your brand—to keep running it until it stops. Most never do. MrBeast does. That’s why he’s still winning.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Scammers would make a lot of money if they used their skills on good.

2/

Gemini 2.5 Pro is getting good at UI too. Sooner, you can one-shot create beautiful UIs. This is a bit hard now unless you use custom AI-focused LLM models like v0, bolt.new, Lovable but it'd be awesome to have it built-in on 1 model.

3/

The era of large influencer is over. Just hire 100 small ones.

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