---
title: 'Is Mr Beast Cheating His Progress Bars?'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=uc0OU1yJD-c'
video_id: 'uc0OU1yJD-c'
date: 2026-07-26
duration_sec: 1368
---

# Is Mr Beast Cheating His Progress Bars?

> Source: [Is Mr Beast Cheating His Progress Bars?](https://youtube.com/watch?v=uc0OU1yJD-c)

## Summary

This video investigates whether Mr Beast manipulates progress bars in his ad reads to discourage skipping. The creator uses custom Python code to track bar movement frame-by-frame, revealing non-linear patterns that decelerate toward the end. The analysis compares bars across multiple Mr Beast videos and other YouTubers, emphasizing the importance of data over intuition.

### Key Points

- **Initial Suspicion** [00:41] — The creator notices that Mr Beast's progress bar during an ad read moves in a 'jerky ridiculous fashion,' not at a standard rate.
- **Deceptive Deceleration** [01:37] — The bar starts fast, then slows down, lulling viewers into thinking the ad is almost over to prevent skipping.
- **Hypothesis Testing** [02:37] — The creator emphasizes the need for math and data to test suspicions, not just rely on vibes.
- **Pixel Tracking Code** [03:06] — A Python script analyzes every frame, measuring the progress bar's position by pixel color differences across a green box.
- **Climate Town Comparison** [04:58] — Climate Town's progress bar moves linearly (fair), serving as a contrast to Mr Beast's decelerating bar.
- **Velocity Plot Insight** [05:57] — The velocity (rate of change) plot reveals an initial acceleration then deceleration, suggesting a keyframe edit.
- **Six Videos Found** [08:38] — Editor Alex identified six Mr Beast videos with progress bars over 18 months.
- **Color Change Hurdle** [11:28] — The bar in 'Survive 100 Days' changes color, requiring code rewrite to track it.
- **Bar Disappearances** [14:30] — In 'Protect the Lamborghini,' the bar disappears and reappears, sometimes continuing to progress off-screen.
- **Nearly Honest Bar** [16:48] — The final Mr Beast video shows a mostly linear bar but with a slight droop at the very end.
- **Data Over Drama** [19:23] — The creator concludes that proper data analysis gives real ammunition for criticism, rather than just being angry.

### Conclusion

The investigation confirms that Mr Beast's progress bars are often manipulated to slow down, making ads seem shorter. The creator urges viewers to use data and statistics to verify suspicions rather than relying on emotion.

## Transcript

I'm trapped here, in an infinite void, with 18 months of Mr Beast videos we have found out if there's something suspicious happening What you see here is a progress bar,
it's indicating how much of this section of the video has happened showing you what percentage has elapsed. So we're up to like 30%, 40% and so on.
you've already seen and how much is still to come. It would be a bit confusing; however, if it didn't move at a standard rate...
that, when Mr Beast did a promo on one of his videos it would move in a jerky ridiculous fashion.
In this Mr Beast video, people aged 1 to 100 I don't know. Anyway, oh, here comes here comes the ad read The idea is it gives you a sense of how long it's going to be
So you think, "Ah, this ad is flying by, what's the point of trying to skip it, I'll just wait it out, it's only going to be that long again..."
Well hang on, it's really - it's really slowed right down, Look at it it's like practically at the end, but not quite there yet... has ended up being a long commercial.
And the idea is it lulls you into a sense of, "It'll be over soon." It's going to be over soon, finally... what I've done is next to it, that other bar.
the new one I've put in above it, that's a fair bar - that's a bar that's moving at the standard rate. one rung up the ladder of, "Huh? That doesn't seem right!"
Because the zeroth step is to see something and think, "that doesn't seem right," And by putting it against a stand- almost there... Finished. By putting it against a standard moving bar
we've gone "hmm, we think this is not moving at a standard rate." So now we know something is up, the next step is maths!
everyone accusing Mr Beast of things; because I think it's a fantastic example of when you have a hypothesis but then you got to put some numbers on it to test it and see if you're right.
Because there's so many things in life and science, economics, you name it - And if we didn't have maths and statistics, that so I put together some terrible Python code
to analyse every single frame of that Mr Beast ad read as the progress bar moves across the screen. So what you can see now, that green box I've put that on there, And I'm taking the average pixel colour per vertical column within that box
and every single frame, my code looks to see how far across the colour is consistent. And the red line is where my code thinks the progress bar is up to, and the number above it is the number of pixels that the progress bar has travelled and this is in HD so, 1,920 pixels wide.
I can take those numbers, put them in a spreadsheet and here is that plot. on the vertical axis is how far the bar has reached.
And, as you can see, starts quite steep and then starts to gradually flatten out. And, the fact that it's curved means that it's not traveling at a fair rate. For comparison, a while ago I did a collab with Climate Town
Rollie appeared in one of my videos, I appeared in their video... Now, my spot in Rollie's video was a lot of maths and here's the thing: your regular Climate Town viewers may not want to watch the kind of in-depth maths I was serving up.
So the climate Town folks put a progress bar at the bottom if they don't, it's easy to skip through because you know how far through the math you are by looking at the bar and doing the math.
I, for completeness, took this section of the Climate Town video, ran it through the same code, so you can see there's my little red bar tracking along. Now, this demonstrates two very important things:
it is moving at a linear rate, every frame to frame it's moving the same distance along, Good work Climate Town!
You'll notice a few weird spots, though, and that's because the data is not perfect; I'm taking video that's been compressed, uploaded to YouTube, it's only in HD not 4K; and my code, while pretty good, is not perfect.
we'll get an error that's not quite right, But that proper line at the top there, that's the actual trend line. So keep that in mind as we go from our first plot of the Mr Beast progress bar,
which is showing the distance over time; we're going to go to its derivative, we're going to go to the rate of change of distance. This plot is the velocity of the bar over time
it's become a lot noisier and it's become a lot more insightful. that's because we're always rounding to the nearest whole pixel and so it means we're kind of falling into discrete buckets.
And if you kind of blur your eyes and look at the general shape of it that's the uncertainty of the fact that there's video compression. I mean originally it would have been rendered out in 4K
But this is what I love about stats, you know in there somewhere Like someone, in the video editing software, working on Mr Beast's video
had to say, "Right at this time you start here go from one to the other." And what you can do in editing software is you can either let that happen at a linear rate,
or you can put another key frame in the middle: There's lots of ways the editor could have made this progress bar,
but by looking at our velocity plot we can see what they did. There's an obvious point here where it goes from one trend in the velocity but we can see initially the velocity is ramping up,
so that must be the initial part that the editor animated, and then there's an abrupt change and then it gradually drops off. So it's weird, it actually accelerates faster at the beginning and then starts to decelerate.
So we can pretty much guarantee the editor put a key frame in right here. we can recreate what the editor was actually doing, At this point you probably have two questions:
Well nothing to do with maths I just broke it, if you want to find out how I broke my arm hand specifically I'll tell you at the very end of the video. Your second question, which is far more relevant to the topic at hand, thanks a lot, is:
"what about all the other Mr Beast videos is this one [an] anomaly, are the others better or worse when it comes to having an honest progress bar?" Well, to find out I set the challenge to my camera person and editor, Alex.
you've got to watch every single Mr Beast video from the last 18 months and find all the ones which have a progress bar. If you're able to complete that challenge, Alex is going to get to keep: his normal salary." [Drum roll followed by party popper sound]
I mean, that seems fair; I pay him quite well, he may disagree, He'll definitely disagree... In the end, Alex found, uh, six Mr Beast videos that had an ad read with a progress bar.
I hate to say, however, I have not passed any judgment on when the ads actually begin and end; and some carry on after it's finished,
Although, on a personal note, I dislike it when content creators try to segue neatly into a sponsor read, So, for example: this video, sponsored by Jane Street.
But I'm not going to talk about them and their fantastic Wise Program, who want to get involved in software development and quantitative trading. I'll talk about that very clearly at the end of the video
(but that'll happen later, right before I talk about the broken arm.) But now, here's the data from The Beast progress bars: The Beast Bars, that's what Beast Bars are.
Here is "Ages 1 to 100", from before, and now you can actually see the real data: I actually have a rolling average, is what I'm plotting here to smooth it out a little
Acceleration, rolling average of the acceleration across five frames for both of those. And that gives us our position plot we saw before, and the acceleration plot.
and look at how fast that bar is going at the beginning! And you'll notice, it's changing colours as it goes. and then works its way across anew every frame,
But, as you can see, it looks like the bar is definitely slowing down it's definitely slowing down as you get near the end, very funny...
and if we slow down to have a look at velocity you can see it's just like the tail end it just tapers out and then goes straight. this should be flat the whole way, I mean level for it to be fair.
If we go back to "Ages 1 to 100" you can see it's got that little extra tick at the bottom, so technically this is different but same result.
Third video: Survive 100 Days in a Bunker", or something... And side note that no one else cares about: see how the bar is now changing colour so I had to totally rewrite the bar tracking part of the code in this case.
In fact, what I did was I went straight to the end and I had to grab that as the code But once I got that working, as you can see, we're getting our numbers again. Let's go check out the spreadsheet and, oh that's familiar, it's got that little uptick at the bottom.
So the previous one, the "Face Your Biggest Fear", no little weird uptick at the beginning; whereas "Ages 1 to 100" did and now this one, "Survive 100 Days", has that same shape. And you can see here: the extra up and then stop,
in the velocity, and then down; so this has an extra key frame there, which face your biggest fear doesn't have that extra key frame. My theory is because obviously Mr Beast has multiple editors,
or maybe setups, that the same editor did "Survive 100 Days" as did "Ages 1 to 100", Whereas a different editor did "Face Your Fears"; which is why, when they made it, they did it a different way.
into exactly how these progress bars are being done, which I find super fascinating. video four, protect the yacht (there's a yacht in there somewhere).
but interestingly, this time look it's gone and so, my poor code, whenever they cut away from the progress bar like this, my code's trying to work out where it is and just giving me back effectively random numbers.
And they keep doing that, like they've gone, "where's the, where's the bar? there is no bar!" And then it's back! Like, it's almost finished and we're only 25 seconds in to a minute and a half ad read.
Because here, no bar for ages, and the very end the bar comes back. So now we got two questions: what's the function that this bar is following as it moves? And is it still running when we can't see it? The spreadsheet reveals all: so where you see a nice smooth line,
that's the bits where my code was frantically jumping around trying to find it. So you can ignore all these, these are just noise from when there was no bar on screen. And these are where there was a bar and we can answer a couple questions.
I mean it's not consistent, because the bar progresses for a while, vanishes, but when it comes back it picks up exactly where it was and then carries on and then vanishes, but this time it's as if it's still progressing while we can't see it;
because there's like, that would be the ghost progress, there, and then likewise here ghost progress, here it vanishes gone for ages and when it comes back - it picks it up from exactly the same point and here it does another weird inflection.
and these are weird, 'cos these are like the opposite of dishonest - they're accelerating, like this one's getting faster towards the end! What? And down here on, ok so again lots and lots of noise on the velocity plot.
But then, here, the velocity is going back up, So that's, that's so weird! I don't fully understand what's happening here.
Second last video, we are protecting a Lamborghini this time. my code will jump around frantically trying to work out where it should be, look how far across it is oh there is it's gone!
And you think, "but the ad was almost over!" And now we got this big interruption. Then, eventually the bar will come back, there it is, and we've still got loads of ad left. I mean there's still, like, two-thirds of the ad left when it looks like it's almost finished.
Ignore this weird, like, S curve thing, that was it trying to find it in the noise. But you can see in the noise this time, initially when that bar disappears it thinks it's right at the max for ages because of that white,
and then it comes down smoothly and then it thinks it's over here. it's going to be max for ages, and then it's going to transition back And that is what you can see here: maxed out and then zips back.
So this, this is a false positive that's not a real part of the progress bar; it's just these four chunks, this time all exactly linear. Why, when we're protecting a yacht, did we get these really weird shapes?
Like this has some kind of messing with the rate at which it's moving. Whereas here, linear: there to there, there to there, there to there and when we can't see it -
it's not moving, can't see it - not moving, can't see it - still moving. So I have... What I can say for certain is there's no internally consistent method they're using, even if it's exactly the same idea for the same style of video,
Last video, "$1 to 250 Million, 'something private I don't know what's going on anymore.'" that's kind of doing what we expect, that's moving at a pretty standard rate.
Has Jimmy finally become an honest progress bar kind of guy, is that linear? You know, you look at it, it's pretty convincing; I assure you when you watch this, that it is linear. Unless we look at the very end, it's not so close, look at this:
this one's really close to being honest, dead straight dead straight well done Jimmy. And then, at the very end, almost imperceivably it curls off. this is level to start with, which is what an honest progress bar would do,
and at the end here you can just see the velocity drooping down. Again, ignore all the noise, we're looking for the signal inside this noise. Now, for completeness and to be fair, so I'm not just picking on Jimmy;
I asked both my Patreon supporters, thank you everyone who makes these videos possible, and, uh, a secret WhatsApp group with a bunch of YouTubers, who will remain anonymous... I asked around for other channels which are either
examples of good progress bars or bad. look at that bar fly, because literally today the tickets There are still some preview dates, I think there's still tickets left in Reading and Bedford,
but then I'm at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. If you're going anywhere near that please come along. And then look at all these other tour dates, there'll be more in the future please come to these. At every show I will do a meet and greet afterwards, so come to any of these and, uh, get your calculator signed.
I was sent this video by Phil Edwards, and it turns out their progress bar's linear, check that out, nice.
at this point I got nervous because I know these folks they make fantastic videos come on please; Then I sent this video, which I believe is the English language version
it seems linear, not bad Dr. Becky! Okay, so first of all, Dr. Becky bar going the other way, had to change the code, thanks a lot...
And while I don't know Dr. Becky well, we do occasionally cross paths, so this will be real awkward if it's not... And very finally, Hacksmith, can't say I watch these videos; however, the bar (well thanks to Dr. Becky, already have the code for the bar going the other way)
So there you are, despite our best efforts we couldn't find any videos where the bars aren't linear. That could just be the sorts of videos my YouTube buddies and my Patreon supporters watch.
But I'm sure they're out there, so if you can find a video with a nonlinear progress bar put it in the comments below, and the top upvoted liked ones I will put through the code and we'll see what happens. So in conclusion: being angry on the internet, or getting involved in YouTube drama, is all well and good
You can't just get angry and accuse people of things because of the vibe, Get some proper data, look into the data, find the signal
and that, that gives you the ammunition to be genuinely upset. And that concept of there being a signal you want to focus on, but some noise you want to ignore, is very important when it comes to data and statistical analysis;
And thank the sponsor of this video, it's Jane Street. That's beside the point. They're a quantitative trading firm and they use things like
machine learning, distributed systems, programmable hardware and, of course, statistics and data to trade on financial markets all around the world. And, that whole thing, is just hiring really good mathematicians and programmers.
And Jane Street are about to run their WISE program at their three biggest offices: And this is a two-day program where you can experience specifically what it would be like to work at Jane Street, and in general
what it would be like to work in that kind of quantitative financial tech industry. you just want to meet people like yourself, who are about to study some kind of STEM subject at university,
there's a link in the description so you, or someone you, know can apply. If you're thinking this all sounds great, here's the list of things you need to be able to apply: needs to be a self-identifying woman or anyone gender expansive
(Jane Street, private company, knows if they want to train and hire the best got to be as diverse as possible.) And secondly, you need to be about to start your first year of university (probably something STEM related, but the point is you're about to go to uni.)
If you, or anyone you know, meets those criteria get involved! you don't need to be in the city where WISE is taking place, of your travel and accommodation costs;
or anything really, you just need to have curiosity about what it might be like to have a career So all the details in the description below, do check them out
And huge thanks to Jane Street for sponsoring this video! And that's how you show the passing of time... Speaking of time passing, thank you for passing your time watching this video.
I hugely appreciate it and if you see anything else on YouTube, any kind of sneakiness that you think needs a good maths-ing, let me know I'll get right onto it. The arm, I broke it by falling off a bicycle.
Ah, real embarrassing and I broke the metacarpal snapped it right at the... OK, the word snap was probably more more aggressive than necessary.
"What a wonderful break, really good, love it, nice and clean all the way across." where I don't break anything but there you go.
spoiler it's not heroic or exciting, I'm gonna talk about it in episode 110 of my podcast, Problem Squared, out, uh. 26th of May. Check it out