Troubled YouTube star Logan Paul has revealed the cost of his recent, questionable behaviour, saying that he lost out on around $5 million in revenue after posting a video from an infamous Japanese suicide forest.
As you may recall, Paul drew an immediate and intense backlash in January of this year when he posted a video of a dead body that he found in the Aokigahara Forest, a place where many Japanese people are known to take their lives.
He swiftly removed the video, and posted a tearful apology, but the damage was done by that point, and YouTube removed him from their preferred partner program, which rewards the site’s top talent with high advertising revenues.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Paul estimated that he lost out on an estimated $5 million from this punishment, but he understands why it happened. “I mean, YouTube had to take a stance. They’re not going to let some kid fuck up their ad platform,” he said.
Amazingly enough, Logan Paul did not seem to learn any lessons from the suicide forest video, as a few weeks later, he posted a video of him zapping a dead rat with a taser, leading YouTube to pull ads from his channel all together.
Ads have since been reinstated, but Paul now seems to be contrite over the dead rat incident too, saying that it’s “one of the dumbest things” he’s ever done, and that it gave those who already hated him a good reason to hate him even more.
Logan Paul’s YouTube channel still pulls in large numbers of viewers, but has never fully recovered from the suicide forest controversy, and he says that he plans to eventually taper off from YouTube and work on a podcast called Impaulsive – “a play on my last name and my tendencies.”
We’ll see how that goes, I guess.
