The king of YouTube addresses his haters and his ridiculous earnings

While being “YouTube famous” still doesn’t earn you the kind of recognition that more traditional celebrities enjoy, it’s still enough to earn you millions of dollars. This is the case with Felix Kjellberg, who goes by the name of PewDiePie and is currently the most popular person on YouTube. While his videos would seem silly to most, they still earned him more than $7.4 million in ad revenue last year, which has drawn criticism from many people. Rather than remaining silent, however, Kjellberg has actually released a surprisingly well-worded and reasonable response to his haters. 

This is Felix Kjellberg, giving us some major real talk about his success—and it’s wonderful. It’s might seem strange to see Pewdiepie, the king of YouTube, speak so frankly here. But after seeing so many articles floating around in the past week about the reported $7.4 million he allegedly made on YouTube in 2014, he felt he needed to respond to a lot of the hate he’s been getting recently. “Money is a topic that I’ve purposely tried to avoid for the five years that I’ve been making videos,” he says. “I just feel like it’s not important to anyone. I just want to make entertaining videos.” This might seem like a dismissal that is pretty easy to make if you’re rich, but it’s at this point in the video that Pewdiepie starts talking about his early days. There was a time when he even he had trouble paying rent and couldn’t afford a computer of his own, he reminds people, so it’s not as if he doesn’t know where people are coming from, too. “I took whatever job I could get, which was to work in a hot dog stand,” he recalls. “I was the happiest I was at that time,” he says. It was during this period that he started making videos. For fun. He says he didn’t know there was money in it at the time. The rest, as we know, is history.