Streaming has made Charlie White into a multi-millionaire, and he has the receipts to prove it. The internet personality known as Moist Cr1TiKaL shared his lifetime earnings from his long-active penguinz0 YouTube channel, revealing that he has earned over $35 million in total revenue since 2007.
White’s financials came into the public eye after the streamer revealed that he would turn off all donations on his Twitch account. His rationale was simple: He makes plenty of money as a top-end creator, and he believes his fans could spend their money better by improving their own lives or donating to charity.
Noble as that decision may be, it didn’t even take a week before White responded to skeptics with another vlog. Some of his followers had wondered how well-off he really is, so he set the record straight: He is doing quite alright. By breaking what he calls “the magician’s code,” White showed his audience that his chosen career path has been more lucrative than most.
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On Twitch, White’s earnings began to accelerate in 2019, and they have not slowed down since then. From 2021 to 2024, he reeled in $4.1 million via the Amazon-owned hub. That figure puts him in line with some of the platform’s other top earners. Felix “xQc” Lengyel, for example, said last year that he makes $6,000 per day from Twitch ads.
As big as those numbers are, they pale in comparison to White’s intake on YouTube. Almost 97% of the $35 million he has made on YouTube has come from “Watch Page ads.” White gets about 120 million YouTube views per week, according to data from Gospel Stats, so he has plenty of opportunities to serve up ads. Memberships, gifts, and Shorts ads provide him with smaller revenue streams.
Notably, these figures don’t even include the money White makes from sponsorships and other brand deals. “I think there is often so many question marks from people wondering how much does a streamer or YouTuber make,” he said. “There’s never any hard numbers to look at, so I think something like this can be helpful for that.”
The amount White makes from ads is not just staggering — it defies contemporary ideas regarding the creator economy. A report from Patreon (which certainly has vested interests of its own) found that creators are shifting more of their earnings to subscriptions and other means of direct fan support. For the man known as Moist, a classic revenue stream is still reliable. “Ads are the bread basket to streamers,” he said.
One could counter White’s data by arguing that his massive YouTube haul is mostly a factor of the long amount of time he has spent on the platform. When you look at the earnings graph he shows in his vlog, however, you can see that his YouTube revenue didn’t begin to accelerate until 2016. He has raked in most of his ad money in recent years, after CPMs had already deflated from previous highs.
Though White will continue to rely on ads while considering himself lucky to have so much financial security, other creators may choose to embrace newer forms of revenue generation. If that’s what they want to do, White is not trying to stop them. “I’m not your dad,” he said.
