MrBeast calls out popular Russian YouTuber for stealing his thumbnails

Jimmy ‘MrBeast’ Donaldson has called out popular Russian YouTuber A4 for stealing his thumbnails, posting side-by-side comparisons that show the creator has been photoshopping his face onto MrBeast.

MrBeast is currently one of the biggest YouTubers out there. With over 53 million subscribers on his main YouTube channel alone, he has established a loyal fan base and a reputation for making bizarre, and often philanthropic content.

Jimmy is known for doing crazy things like buying islands, clearing out an entire store’s worth of products, and plenty more videos that both aim to entertain and give back to his audience and friends.

With the success he’s had, and the quality of his videos, it’s only natural that many creators out there will want to emulate MrBeast’s style, but sometimes people take a little too much inspiration from the viral videos.

On February 19, Jimmy tweeted a series of screenshots that showed his thumbnails next to a popular Russian YouTube channel, A4. A4 has just over 28 million subscribers, with his videos regularly getting over 10 million views.

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His videos largely consist of challenges like, “the last on to get out of hypnosis challenge,” and “24 hours in Kindergarten challenge.” Among the videos are some that are strikingly similar to MrBeast’s own content like, “the last one to leave the desert island challenge.”

In his tweet, Jimmy wrote: “The largest channel in Russia just takes my thumbnails and photoshops his face on mine.” The thumbnail comparisons show just that, with A4 using some exact copies of MrBeast’s thumbnails with the faces replaced, and others recreating the exact setup of the original thumbnails.

A4 responded to the tweet on his Instagram story, and from some commenter’s rough translations the YouTuber appears to brush off the backlash.

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The translations imply that he considers the quality of the content to be the most important thing, claiming that he can do it better than MrBeast.

While many fans are calling for A4 to be banned, it’s unclear what exactly the rules are regarding copyright issues for thumbnails.

Regardless, the issue has baffled fans who had never heard of A4 until MrBeast tweeted about him.