PewDiePie: Let’s talk about money

YouTube superstar PewDiePie has responded to critics of his salary.

It was revealed yesterday that the Swedish digital powerhouse’s production company PewDiePie Productions made $7.44m in 2014. And as a guy who lives out his life on the internet, he’s had to take a lot of abuse as a result.

Let’s talk about money for a little bit,” he said. Money is the topic that I’ve purposely tried to avoid for the five years I’ve been making videos because I just feel like it’s not important to anyone and I just want to make entertaining videos.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate money. I’m not going to pretend like it doesn’t matter to me because it matters to everyone.

What people I guess don’t really think about until it’s in their face is that I have 9bn views, and that translates to something. There are ads on my videos, I make money out of those. So whenever it comes out how much I made in a certain year, people get so shocked and a lot of people 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. Which is true.

But there’s so much more to it than that. I do work a tremendous amount. I understand that haters gonna hate, right?”

Kjellberg goes on to show examples of some of the unpleasant message she’s received. He even tells one guy – who called him a ‘retard’, incidentally – that he believes in him and that he can go on to achieve great things himself.

I really think that money doesn’t make you happy,” he added. I’m just as happy now as I was five years ago. I’m very happy that I don’t have to worry about paying rent because that was a huge issue. So I’m happy about that, but other than that it doesn’t change much.

It seems like the whole word cares more about how much money I make than I do. We did raise $1m for charity and very few articles picked up on that but here it is everywhere how much money I make. I don’t think there’s a good reason why everyone should care. I’m sorry I had to waste a video on this but I just felt like it had to be said.”

Here’s the video: