Cost of a 30-second Super Bowl ad

It turns out that the price networks will pay to flash a car commercial at you for thirty seconds moves in almost perfect synchronisation with the number of people subscribed to watch a twenty-three-year-old man give away money on the internet, which is either a profound insight into the attention economy or evidence that the universe is playing an elaborate prank on anyone who thinks correlation means anything at all. One rises, the other rises. One might as well cause the other, if you squint and stop thinking.

The real culprit, almost certainly, is that both metrics are measuring the same underlying phenomenon: the explosive growth of digital advertising spend and creator-driven content from 2016 to 2023, a period in which the total value of online video advertising roughly tripled while YouTube itself went from "where people watch cat videos" to "where 18-to-35-year-olds spend more time than on traditional television." MrBeast's subscriber count tracked the platform's overall explosion and the rise of the parasocial mega-creator, while Super Bowl ad rates tracked advertisers' collective realisation that they had nowhere else to spend their money; both were passengers on the same economic current, watching each other in the mirror and mistaking reflection for causation. By 2023, a Super Bowl ad cost roughly five and a half million dollars, while MrBeast had amassed over two hundred million subscribers—both numbers so large they stopped meaning anything to the human brain about halfway through the sentence.

What we are looking at, then, is not evidence that YouTube fame causes television pricing or vice versa, but rather a culture-wide shift in where eyeballs go and therefore where money follows, a process so massive and fast-moving that the only surprising thing is that we expected them not to move together. The numbers rise in parallel not because one pulls the other, but because both are being pulled by something else entirely—something we can measure but not quite see. We remain baffled by our own systems.