Swedish YouTuber Felix Kjellberg, better known as "PewDiePie" has revealed that he earns the equivalent of £2.4 million in ad sales every year.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Kjellberg said that his videos -- which are uploaded twice daily and feature the 24-year-old playing different video games while chatting -- are astonishingly lucrative. "I play video games and try to entertain to the best of my abilities," he said. "It's kind of amazing that I can play video games for a living. When I realised that for the first time, I almost got teary-eyed."
Since beginning his YouTube career while studying in Gothenburg in 2010, Kjellberg has amassed 27 million subscribers, but didn't sign an advertising deal until December 2012. His ads are now managed by Maker Studios, which takes a cut of his revenue and sold itself to Walt Disney Co. in early 2014.
PewDiePie is directly responsible for the brief flash of popularity surrounding Flappy Bird. The app rocketed to the top of the App Store charts after he published a video titled "Flappy Bird -- Don't Play This Game". "It's cool to have this kind of influence, but at the same time it's kind of scary," said Kjellberg, who now lives in Brighton. "Unlike many professionally produced shows, I think I've established a much closer contact with my viewers, breaking the wall between the viewer and what's behind the screen," he said. "What I and other YouTubers do is a very different thing, it's almost like hanging around and watching your pal play games. My fans care in a different way about what they are watching."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
