Ella Scott
MrBeast - real name Jimmy Donaldson - is one of the biggest YouTubers in the world. With 146 million subscribers and viral videos that clock up billions of views, the American content creator is dominating the platform.
Switch onto MrBeast’s YouTube channel and you’ll likely see videos giving away tons of cash, and wild challenges such as the Squid Game experiment.
His out-of-the-box ideas have scored him a huge fan base, however, he isn’t the only creative in the Donaldson family.
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His older brother, CJ Donaldson, also makes YouTube videos — but they are now very different to when he first got started on the platform.
Donaldson first gained success on YouTube when he was featured in one of MrBeast’s videos.
Titled ‘I Gave My Brother 24 Hours To Spend $100000’, MrBeast gave his brother 5 debit cards that were loaded with $20,000 (£17,624.60) each.
In the video, Donaldson can be seen spending a total of $99,472 (£79,867.06) on the likes of TVs and game consoles.
Following the popularity of the content, Donaldson’s own YouTube channel, MrBro, started to gain serious traction in August 2019 and he accumulated a staggering 1 million followers in just 24 hours.
However, he wasn’t able to capitalise on the community quite as well as his younger brother did.
Fans claimed that MrBro was copying MrBeast’s content — similar video styles and thumbnail designs were said to have been replicated by the elder brother.
Donaldson started to receive criticism, with some YouTube users calling him and his team, ‘the budget MrBeast team’.
Following the negativity from fans, Donaldson eventually took a break from the platform for six months in October 2020.
At the time of writing, he hasn’t uploaded a video to his main channel - now named CjTheseDays - since June 5 2021.
The name change is believed to be a way for Donaldson to strike out on his own on YouTube and away from the shadow of his younger brother.
Elsewhere, Donaldson now makes Minecraft videos via his gaming channel, CJTheseGames.
Since he started the channel on June 7 2022, he’s wracked up 1.2 million views and has over 90K subscribers.
Following Donaldson changing his name from MrBro to CjTheseDays and starting up his gaming channel, fans have come out in their droves to praise the YouTuber.
“Massive respect,” wrote one fan. “He changed his channel name because he wanted his own fans and didn’t need to leech off of his brother’s account.”
Another said, “It’s a great name. He effectively states where he’s at in life, who he was/is, and what he wants to be on his platform.
All without stating who his brother is and still letting people know who his brother is.”
However, not everyone is impressed with Donaldson’s pivot on the platform.
“He was literally handed a platform and then just gave up because it was ‘hard’ and there were haters.”
Another wrote, “We have Mrbeast, The fake Mrbeast, and now CjTheseDays.”
A third commenter believes that Donaldson’s gaming channel is still similar to MrBeast’s earlier content.
They wrote, “When you look at [the Minecraft videos] they are completely identical to the ones that MrBeast made.
“Not saying CJ is copying him still but it’s also not like MrBeast hasn’t been [making Minecraft videos] for years.”