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YouTube star Felix Kjellberg wants you to know that he doesn’t care about the buckets of money he’s made.
Kjellberg, who goes by the handle “PewDiePie,” is famous for posting videos of himself shrieking obscenities while he plays video games. He has by far the largest following on Google’s massive video site YouTube, racking up almost 38 million subscribers and 9.3 billion views of his gaming videos.
And that is bringing in the money. Last year, Kjellberg pulled in about $7.5 million, roughly double the previous year’s tally, the Swedish newspaper Expressen is reporting, citing the latest annual report for his company, Pewdie Productions.
Not a big surprise for YouTube’s biggest personality, perhaps. But Kjellberg has apparently grown weary of criticism that he’s making his money by letting people watch him play video games all day.
In a 6-minute video posted Tuesday, Kjellberg addresses those critics in a calm tone that many of his viewers would likely find alien. He tells of his cash-strapped days before YouTube mega-success and defends his livelihood, saying that the entertainment value is more important than the money.
“Money is a topic that I’ve purposely tried to avoid for the five years that I’ve been making videos,” he said. “I just feel like it’s not important to anyone. And I just want to make entertaining videos.”
YouTube’s user-generated format means some people dismiss it as a repository for silly prank clips and cat videos, but Google’s site is the undisputed king of free online video, with more than a billion people visiting it every month. That means its top stars like PewDiePie not only have mind-boggling audience size but also revenue to match. Some people are shocked — and sometimes angered — by the discrepancy between how much money these video makers rake in and how unsophisticated their clips are perceived to be.
After saying that he hadn’t known there was money to be made in gaming video, Kjellberg points out that he has more than 9 billion views of his videos and that those videos carry ads.
“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.”
Kjellberg also noted that in the discussions of his earnings, his efforts to raise money for charities aren’t often mentioned. By publicizing several fund drives on his channel, he said, his fans and sponsors last year collectively raised more than $1 million for the World Wildlife Fund, St. Jude’s Hospital, Charity: Water, and Save the Children over more than two years.
“I understand that haters gonna hate, right?” he said. “But I don’t know. I really think money doesn’t make you happy.”
CNET News’ Joan Solsman contributed to this report.
