The top YouTube earner operates from a small city, not a media hub

Evidence

The highest earning “star” of YouTube in 2021 and 2022 was Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast. Donaldson, at the time, was a twenty-four-year-old living in Greenville, North Carolina. Greenville is a city of around ninety thousand located about an hour east of Raleigh, the state’s capital. Raleigh is one of three cities that make up North Carolina’s “Research Triangle,” a location known for its prevalence of universities and technology companies, a center of the “New South” and its varied investments in technology and finance. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 226