Mark Rober

Mark Rober spent years as an engineer at NASA before YouTube, and his channel still works like an engineering project with an audience. Forbes describes a team of about 100 and episodes that cost seven figures each — a roller coaster built to explain physics, an attempt to escape Alcatraz using science, a robotics lesson filmed with Cristiano Ronaldo. More than 57 million people subscribe on YouTube.

Expensive videos only work if something pays for them, and Forbes points to two things. One is sponsorship: brands including Rivian, Google and Disney pay to appear alongside educational content that families watch together. The other is CrunchLabs, his company selling science and engineering kits by subscription, which turns viewers into paying customers month after month rather than one video at a time.

That model makes Rober's figure hard to compare with a channel that lives on advertising. Part of what he earns depends on how many families keep a subscription running, and part on sponsors' budgets for education-flavoured marketing. Forbes' $30 million is its estimate of what reaches him from all of it; it is not CrunchLabs' revenue, and Forbes does not break it down.

In spring 2026 he gave a TED talk on a plan to improve science, technology, engineering and maths teaching in the United States, which is the direction the profile suggests his business is heading. On this site his counter matches IShowSpeed's exactly — both at $30 million, about $0.95 a second — two very different routes to the same estimate.