YouTube gaming star PewDiePie 'earned $7M in 2014' | Hacker News Reader

YouTube gaming star PewDiePie 'earned $7M in 2014'

bbc.co.uk

26 pointsmerah16 comments

> "I make more than I need from YouTube," he wrote on Reddit. "With that freedom, but also to respect my fans for making that possible, I don't end up doing many endorsements."

never watched a single video of his, but from this article he seems like a nice guy, hopefully he's being a good role model for the kids who watch him

I can't stand commentaries in gameplay videos but just my personal preference for commentary free gameplay focused videos.

In the past he's been criticized for making a lot of extremely juvenile and bad taste jokes (the biggest one people complain about is that he often screams that the monsters in horror games are going to "rape" him). I've heard though that he's gotten better about the kind of jokes he makes, and most of the indie game developers I follow on Twitter seem to respect him.

That's good if he's gotten better. I remember seeing some of his videos in the past and they were in extremely bad taste.

How dare he, quick, we need to make YouTube into the same "bleep every bad word out" medium!

If we just make it into another TV, we won't need to change! We will not be challenged!

Shrieking "It's raping me! raaaaaaapppppppppe!!!!!!" isn't exactly challenging speech. It's just stupid.

Stupid speech is just as protected as the things you want to hear. More so, in my particular POV, although it seems pretty clear there are many groups of people who believe that that things they don't want to hear should be prohibited.

I don't think anyone here is saying that he shouldn't be allowed to say it: merely that he shouldn't say it.

You're still allowed to think that people are idiots/assholes for saying things. You're still allowed to put pressure on them to change. None of these things are at odds with the speech being legally protected.

I think my ability to say I'm glad he's apparently being less of a shithead is also protected speech. Why are we talking about this again? Nobody said he should be arrested.

Seems to be a word of a younger generation. I was into og xbox live, but stopped after highschool. After college, I bought an xbox one to game with my little bro and he was constantly using the word rape to describe himself being killed. It threw my off for a day or two then I shrugged and said kids will be kids. lol.

If he had a conventional TV show nobody would be surprised. The number of people that watch his content is astronomical, every one of his videos has over a million views. He's much more heavily viewed than, say, cable news networks like CNN. Indeed, more people watch him than NBC, ABC, or CBS.

And what I can't understand is why _exactly_ is he so viewed? He doesn't seem to be particularly anything-- off-the-cuff witty, insightful, skilled, voice is slightly obnoxious (but not enough to be unintentionally funny).

There are a lot of other let's play/game reviewers out there which are fun for various reasons (in each case) but they don't reach nearly the same viewership.

Is it just momentum? What am I not getting?

It's mostly momentum. I think he was one of the first let's-players to do shrill voices and gained popularity when there just wasn't much competition for the kind of audience he attracted.

I'd love to say he's only popular with children, but I know people in their twenties who enjoy his videos. I'm not sure I get it, but he's found something that works and it doesn't show any signs of dying off.

EDIT: I'm also convinced he's part of the reason "LeFloid" is having so much success compared to other German YouTubers. It's the same formula, except with "facts"/"news" videos instead of let's-plays (and thus a lot more face time). No matter what I think of them, their success proves them right.

EDIT2: For PewDiePie I think a big part of his success are also his looks. He looks like the kind of actor teenage girls obsess about. Good looking + funny = instant crush.

Plus he has moved to 3 different countries, picking up viewers from them all. And how YouTube's Recommended Videos system works.

Here's someone's analysis of why he got so popular. Looks, editing skills, and personality also helped build him a niche. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgMqhEMhVV8

Popular appeal is one of those things that remains quite resistant to dissection and scrutiny. Up to a certain point, measurable talent drives success, but at the highest levels, the drivers of success become a lot harder to characterize. Why is pop star X so famous? Or pop star Y get so famous so quickly, but then fade from view? Or Z remaining a niche act, despite obviously superior talent? I've read a lot of retrospectively written narratives (that are suspiciously overfitted) but the drivers of fame are still poorly understood (partly because when one thing works, everyone tries that, and fame is zero-sum).

You're not even remotely close on that speculation.

CBS did $13.8 billion in revenue last year. If more people were watching PewDiePie than CBS, he would be earning a lot more than $7 million per year.

He's averaging five million views per day over five years. His new content gets one to two million views in the first day. His clips are typically five to eight minutes long.

Big Bang Theory alone has 20 million viewers. Pound for pound those viewers are worth drastically more. CBS also has vastly more programming per day.

One single program alone - the CBS evening news - has more dedicated viewers (5 million), and a larger economic base, than PewDiePie.

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