On March 1, 2026, YouTuber Rosanna Pansino called Jimmy “MrBeast” for buying video views. Jimmy has the largest channel on YouTube with nearly 470 million subscribers. During February 2026, he had more than 3 billion views, and over the lifetime of his channel, he had a total of approximately 113 billion views. While this may seem like an impressive feat to many, Rosanna Pansino called it a foul.

After Beast Industries CEO Jeff Housenbold announced that MrBeast had 1.45 billion unique viewers in 90 days, Pansino responded: Question the legitimacy of this indicator:

“Has the MrBeasts CEO revealed how many of those views were purchased? It was recently discovered that last year alone, MrBeast ran both long and short videos as ads 428 times. Although he purchased views, his long video views were down about 50% from last year.”

She followed up a day later and mentioned that through YouTube Promotion, Jimmy could effectively buy views:

“Let the team run some tests! Apparently if you spend $1 million (the amount MrBeast is giving away in the video), you can buy nearly 600 million views using YouTube Promotion. Here’s a screenshot of the YouTube backend where you enter the number of views you want to buy for the video. It turns out that it’s easy to inflate views and subscriptions when you’re a billionaire and have some extra cash to spend.”

She also attached a screenshot of YouTube’s backend page, where a $1 million budget was filled in. The $1 million will be used to increase engagement, which is expected to generate 590 million views.

For context, Google business articles on Creator Promotions points out that YouTube Promotion is a built-in tool that allows creators to pay to display their videos or shorts to a wider target audience on YouTube, helping to increase views, engagement and potential subscribers by getting your content in front of more relevant viewers.

Rosanna Pansino speaks out against MrBeast accusations of buying views in YouTube promotion

Rosanna Pansino supplemented her comments via user interaction on X:

“With promotions, you pay to have your video run as a pre-roll or mid-roll ad. It has nothing to do with the ‘homepage’. It’s not a banner or thumbnail ad. It automatically plays your video as an ad break and counts as a view.”

Essentially, Pansino used the Promote feature to suggest that Jimmy place some of his videos as paid ads on YouTube and get some views/subscribers that way.

She responded to Jeff Housenbold’s original statement, saying there’s nothing inherently “wrong” with using YouTube’s built-in features, while adding “Bragging” views yes:

“There’s nothing wrong with buying views on YouTube (it’s a built-in feature called ‘Promote’). What’s crazy is buying tons of views and then bragging about how many views you got.”

In other news, former FaZe Clan member Nick “Lacy” advises MrBeast His $1 million worth of videos should be live streamedclaiming content creators would “leak” information.