Web-based Comedian and Producer PewDiePie is the highest paid YouTube star

Forbes for the first time has released the rankings of highest paid YouTube stars and guess who topped the list? It’s PewDiePie – the Swedish video-gamer. The 25 year old web – based comedian and producer whose actual name is Felix Kjellberg has earned $12 million last year according to Forbes. He has over 40 million viewers subscribed to his YouTube channel. His channel features gameplays with his commentaries. Smosh – the comedy duo (Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox) bagged the second position with $8.5 million along with Fine Brothers (Rafi and Benny Fine). Fourth position was claimed by Lindsey Stirling – the dancing violinist with $6 million. The earnings are measured by Forbes’ list before subtracting any management fees and taxes. Also the numbers are based up on data from IMDB, Nielson and so on. Plus the stars, agents, lawyers, managers, insiders etc. are interviewed. The estimates are made on June 1st. According to Forbes, a major part of the earning comes from the advertisements and the rest comes from TV, music, books and movies. Some of the YouTube stars own product lines.

Felix Kjellberg is popularly known as PewDiePie and is best known for his commentaries and Vlogs series titled ‘Let’s Play’. Felix was pursuing his Industrial Economics and technology Management degree when he dropped out in 2010 to focus on his PewDiePie YouTube account. To support his videos he also worked at a hot dog stand. In 2012, his channel had more than 1 million subscribers. Since august, 2013 his channel has topped the most subscribed channels. In 2014 PewDiePie’s channel even surpassed Rihanna’s VEVO, thus becoming the most viewed channel. In September 2015, the channel had gained up to 10 million views. PewDiePie’s fan base is known as the ‘Bro Army’ and fans as individuals are called ‘Bros’. He has also raised money for several charities. Concerning dropping out of Chalmer’s PewDiePie says, “Thinking about it now, it was utterly absurd. To get into Chalmers for industrial economics you need straight A’s, but somehow I was happier selling hot dogs and making my own gaming-videos.”

What makes his videos different from normal walkthroughs is his idea of “sharing gaming moments on YouTube with my bros.” earlier he was known to play action and horror video games such as Amnesia: The Dark Descent. He started vlogs from September 2011 which typically end with a “Brofist”. Various outlets have described the content of his videos as full of energy and profanity and goofy. His commentaries have shown a positive effect on popularity of Indie games, Goat Simulator and Slender: the Eight Pages. McPixel’s developers said, “The largest force driving attention to McPixelat that time were ‘Let’s Play’ videos. Mostly by Jesse Cox and PewDiePie.”

Image Source: indianexpress.com