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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 7843171" data-attributes="member: 177">Someone (a gent with the handle "MrBeast" on YouTube) seems to have used the dynamics of internet adversiting to become a professional philanthropist.It goes like this:  He gets a company to give him a philanthropic grant of some kind (for giving cash to the needy, or the like).  He makes a video of the philanthropy, apparently designed to be positive and entertaining and all that.The video goes viral.  His AdSense presence goes up.  He gets more income, and more companies want to sponsor his work.  Which drives up his AdSense revenue, and presence, so more companies want to work with him and get their ads seen.  Lather, Rinse, Repeat – he takes some of the ad revenue to live on, and uses the rest alongside corporate deals to do more philanthropy.This has grown very large.  He has over 20 million YouTube subscribers.  Now, every video of his is effectively viral.Which brings us to his current project – on reddit, he noted that he was about to get his 20 millionth subscriber, and said, “What should I do for that subscriber?”  Someone suggested he plant 20 million trees, thinking it'd be a joke.  Not to MrBeast...He has parlayed this into a huge project – possibly the largest collaboration seen from YouTube content creators, called “TeamTrees”.  Their goal is to raise $20 million dollars by Jan 1, 2020, to plant trees.  The National Arbor Day Foundation knows a few things about reforestation at scale, and they can plant them for $1/tree – so that’s where the money goes.Which sounds all cool, with content providers making videos, and followers of these content creators donating the $1 to $50 to $100 and such.  But then Elon Musk donates $1 million (and makes a Tolkien reference as a kicker).  An hour later, Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Square & Twitter donates $150,000.  And today the CEO of Spotify decides to one-up Musk, and is trying to donate $1,000,001.  There’s a small technical issue, in that the donation page can’t handle numbers that high unless you play games with the form source…And, in four days, they have raised over $8 million dollars,  and MrBeast is up to 25 million subscribers.  Because a guy did nice things for people on YouTube.Visit <a href="https://teamtrees.org/" target="_blank">Help Us Plant 20 Million Trees - Join #TeamTrees</a>, if you are interested….</blockquote>

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