Swedish Let’s Play megastar PewDiePie has earned $7million (£4.5million) over the last 12 months from his gaming videos on YouTube. The 25-year-old online celebrity, whose real name is Felix Kjellberg, has 37 million subscribers on YouTube, making his the most subscribed channel on the world’s largest video-sharing site.
This hasn’t gone down well with some sections of the internet. After the news exploded online – thanks in most part to Facebook’s sensationalist Trending News – many people were shocked and outraged that someone just making videos for YouTube could earn more than a highly qualified doctor, and have their voices be heard all over the web.
The uproar to his earnings has been so huge that PewDiePie felt compelled to issue a response, and he did it today morning on his YouTube channel. In the candid six-minute video, an uncharacteristically sombre and thoughtful Felix explains his relationship with wealth and success. “Money is a topic that I’ve purposely tried to avoid for the five years that I’ve been making videos,” he says. “I just feel like it’s not important to anyone. I just want to make entertaining videos.”
“Whenever it comes out how much I made a certain year, people just get so shocked,” he continued. “A lot of people were also very, very angry. They thought it was unfair. They thought I just sit on my ass all day and I just yell at the screen.”
Kjellberg then reminded his viewers that he wasn’t always as lucky as he is now. When he began five years ago, he was a struggling student making ends meet with a job on a hot dog stand. “I took whatever job I could get, which was to work in a hot dog stand,” he recalls. “I was the happiest I was at that time,” he says. It was during this period that he started making videos of himself playing various video games, just for fun. He didn’t even know there was money in it at the time.
“So whenever it comes out how much I made a certain year, people just get so shocked. A lot of people also were very very angry. They thought it was unfair, they thought that I just sit on my ass all day and I just yell at the screen all day…which is true! But there’s so much more to it than that.”
This isn’t the first time Kjellberg has addressed his income. When The Wall Street Journal published a piece last June about him making $4 million in 2013, he hosted a Reddit AMA, answering questions about his income, and the contributions he has made to charity.