Two weeks back, YouTube‘s highest-paid star, the perennially puckish PewDiePie, made waves when he threatened to delete his channel over concerns that the platform was trying to “kill” his content, only to come good on the promise by deleting his other, much-less popular channel.
Overnight, he released another video, explaining in more depth why he threatened to pull the plug when he reached a milestone of 50 million subscribers, and how it got out of hand. “If your channel is dying, just pull a PR stunt,” he said with a smirk, before getting a little more serious and going into the reasons behind his decision.
The vlogger, real name Felix Kjellberg, has built up tens of millions of subscribers over years of hard work, and says that he takes his channel seriously, in spite of his misgivings with YouTube, and the image he consciously cultivates thanks to “this weird silly Swedish guy persona where I’m just an idiot.”
Ever the altruist, he went on to say that he pulled his stunt in part to stand up for lesser-known YouTubers who were also getting screwed over by YouTube’s mysterious algorithm, and didn’t have the same platform to say something about it. (For what it’s worth, he says that YouTube still hasn’t given him a satisfactory answer on that score).
He also complained that, in the midst of all the ‘PewDiePie is deleting his channel’ drama, very few outlets reported on the fact that he and his mates raised more than $1.3 million for the AIDS non-profit Red in a live-streaming effort, something for which they definitely deserve congratulations.
We’ve hit our #Cringemas donation goal!! ?? thank you @RED, @YouTube, @gatesfoundation, and ALL OF YOU ?? 1.3 million raised to #EndAIDS! pic.twitter.com/ZL8iqNiOyI
— Revelmode (@revelmode) December 10, 2016
You can watch the whole thing below:
Source: YouTube.
Photo: YouTube.
