People have come up with a lot of epithets for YouTube’s most subscribed individual creator, Felix Kjellberg aka PewDiePie, due to his recent antics. You can now add “untouchable” to the list.
In an interview with Polygon, executive producer of YouTube gaming channel Smosh Games, Dave Raub, explained why no one can touch Kjellberg despite his growing laundry list of controversies. To put it simply, Raub noted, “He’s at the top.”
The YouTube gamer has a largely loyal following of over 57 million subscribers. At 27-years-old, he was the ranked the highest paid YouTube star by Forbes at the end of 2016, having earned a reported $15 million that year. His channel has been the most subscribed-to individual’s channel since 2013.
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Lately, Kjellberg has come under fire for using racial slurs and making racist jokes in his videos. Most recently, he used the n-word during a livestream. Before that, he posted multiple videos featuring anti-Semitic humor and Nazi imagery. For that, YouTube canceled the second season of his YouTube Red series, Scare PewDiePie, and took his channel out of the Google Preferred program, which bundles YouTube’s top creators into pricier packages for advertisers. Maker Studios also dropped him from its YouTube network.
Raub shed some light on PewDiePie’s offensive content by saying, “We know that he plays a character. We know that he does things for shock value, which is something that he’s been doing for years.” A major element of Kjellberg’s character is that he just is offensive, and since he’s playing a character, that should be the same as an actor representing an offensive character on a sitcom. However, on YouTube, the line between fiction and reality blurs more easily than on other forms of entertainment, especially since Kjellberg doesn’t explicitly present his YouTube persona as one separate from his true self.
Raub called Kjellberg’s followers part of “a different type of community” from the one that subscribes to the Smosh Games channel, where he and his colleagues don’t necessarily agree with “the things that [Kjellberg] says and does.” That different type of community is still seemingly incredibly supportive of Kjellberg. PewDiePie is currently averaging several million views per upload and his subscriber base continues to grow. That all will keep him afloat no matter how many game developers vow to request takedowns for his videos or how many networks drop him. In other words, the guy’s kind of untouchable.
