Ex-Navy SEAL MrBallen’s first viral video hit while he was at a water park with his kids. Now he has 11.4 million subscribers and a SiriusXM deal
After all, John Allen, the former Navy SEAL behind the MrBallen empire, now has 11.4 million YouTube subscribers and last year signed a major deal with SiriusXM that’s reported to be worth as much as $70 million.
- In many ways, my career within the military was off to such a great start.” He felt as if he was having an “identity crisis.” For the next couple of years, Allen tried his hand at different work, cofounding a charity that ran in-person networking events connecting veterans with employers.
- “I suddenly didn’t have any work—like nothing.” Becoming MrBallen At the time, Allen was a devoted follower of Gary Vaynerchuk, the entrepreneur who preaches that everyone should be making content online.
- As the world locked down and TikTok became the center of the culture, Allen, in his iconic flannel and a backwards hat, said his videos were being pushed hard by the platform, and within a few months he had millions of followers.
While the pension that came with that was meaningful, he told Fortune, he had a wife and two young kids at the time (he now has three)—and it “certainly wasn’t enough” to live on comfortably.
But days later, he posted his second video on the platform: a personal story about an unexplained experience he had at age 16 at a cabin in New Hampshire.
- So Allen filmed himself telling a 60-second version of that story like he was telling a friend, posted it to TikTok, and went to the water park.
- But that month, on a family trip to indoor water park Great Wolf Lodge, he had his breakthrough.
- He enlisted in the Navy and joined SEAL Team 2 in 2012, but in 2014 he was badly wounded by an enemy grenade during a firefight in Afghanistan.
- By late 2020, Allen’s TikTok comments were full of requests for longer, deeper versions of his stories, so YouTube became a more viable option—and a way to make money.
- His first video about a supposedly haunted house in Spain flopped.
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