MrBeast and top creators turn to platform gurus

When wildlife TV personality Forrest Galante sat down for his monthly call with YouTube consultant Paddy Galloway, he received some bad news.

No more turtles.

Galante has 2.5 million YouTube subscribers. He’s been producing wildlife programming for more than a decade, including a docuseries on Animal Planet and a show on the History Channel. He owns his own production company. Generally speaking, Galante’s got a good feel for what his audience wants. 

But it was Galloway, something of a guru in the still-burgeoning YouTube creator economy, who identified that whenever Galante showed turtles in his videos, viewer engagement dropped. It was consistent and significant.

“Maybe it’s just turtles are more commonplace and they’re kind of slow and they don’t really do much,” Galloway said in an interview. “We noticed three or four videos in a row, when Forrest was showing turtles, the viewers were just kind of disengaged, and they were leaving.”

This is the kind of insight that many of the most popular YouTube creators, including Jimmy Donaldson, known to the world as MrBeast, and sports creator Jesse Riedel, also known as Jesser, have paid Galloway to provide. 

As YouTube creatorship cracks open millions, or potentially even billions, of dollars for the most-watched personalities, Galloway has made a name for himself as one of the best of a growing class of YouTube consultants — a bona fide YouTube whisperer.

“I think he’s an absolute genius,” said Galante. 

“Super smart guy,” Riedel told CNBC.

“I don’t want to say Paddy has changed my life completely,” said Humphrey Yang, a former financial advisor whose YouTube channel has more than 2 million subscribers. “But he’s definitely helped a lot.”

YouTube makes up 12.7% of all streaming in the U.S., according to Nielsen’s most recent “The Gauge” report. Netflix is second with 8.4%, followed by Disney with 5%.

Sixty-seven million people consider themselves online content creators, according to a 2025 Goldman Sachs report. That number could rise to more than 100 million by 2030, Goldman estimates.

About 10,000 U.S. YouTube channels have more than 1 million subscribers, according to a YouTube spokesperson. For many of these creators, YouTube can be a lucrative full-time job. But to make a business out of the largely free platform, videos need to get consistent clicks — preferably in the millions.

With YouTube’s recommendation algorithm constantly evolving, many creators have been turning to strategists to maintain success on the platform.

“From zero [subscribers] to 1 million, you don’t need it, but from 1 million to 10 million, or 1 million to 100 million, you definitely need a strategist,”…