By Penny Theodorakopoulou,
Almost every gamer has heard that phrase at least once, either on YouTube in certain videos or probably read in an article, just like this one. The one who said this phrase used to literally be the king of YouTube for years. You — probably — know who I am talking about. His name: PewDiePie, and his real name — Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg.
Who is PewDiePie?
PewDiePie is a Swedish content creator, online personality, and content creator for YouTube. His Let’s Play videos and gaming comments, which helped him become well-known both inside and outside of YouTube, were a major factor in his rise to stardom.
PewDiePie is regarded as one of YouTube’s most popular video creators and has been closely associated with gaming and live broadcasting on the site. In the early years of his career, as his channel quickly grew in followers, his material diversified to include scripted series, vlogs, and entertainment videos. In fact, he had been dominating YouTube for years due to his gaming videos, earning him huge amounts of views, sponsorships, and deals with famous companies, such as Disney Channel.
Thanks to Minecraft, the very first game he played and uploaded a video of it to his YouTube channel, he was the first person to ever reach 100 million subscribers. Unfortunately, due to the PewDiePie-T-Series conflict, he was not the first ever YouTube channel to reach that goal. Nowadays, he has “resigned” from the gaming content of his channel, as he has been dedicating his videos for the past couple of years to commentary and vlog videos; but when a famous game is released, he makes sure to stream it.
Now, who was Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg before YouTube?
Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg was raised in Gothenburg, where he was born on October 24, 1989. He was a younger sister of Fanny and was the son of Lotta Kristine Johanna and Ulf Christian Kjellberg. His mother was honored as Sweden’s 2010 CIO of the Year. She was a former chief information officer (CIO). His father works in business management.
Felix revealed that he drew well-known video game characters like Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog throughout his childhood and played games on his Super Nintendo Entertainment System including Star Fox and Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest. He frequently skipped classes in high school to hang out with buddies at an Internet café while playing video games in his room. He purchased a computer during his senior year of high school using the proceeds from the sale of his artwork at his grandmother’s gallery while working at a hot dog stand in order to continue his passion because his parents did not approve of his decision and did not support him financially.
Felix later continued his studies at the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg to earn a degree in industrial economics and technology management, but he left the institution in 2011. While it has been said that Felix left Chalmers to concentrate on his YouTube career, he was actually dissatisfied with his program of study, as he explained in 2017. He said it would be “f*cking stupid”, as he mentioned in his video “BEFORE I WAS FAMOUS” in January 2017, to drop out of school to focus on a YouTube career in general.
Felix has also spoken about his love of Adobe Photoshop and his desire to use it to create photo manipulation art rather than attend classes. After leaving Chalmers, he continued to pursue this desire by entering Photoshop competitions and nearly landing an internship at a well-known Scandinavian advertising agency. He had a passion for making YouTube videos as well, so after being rejected from the apprenticeship, he sold limited edition prints of his manipulated artwork. With the money from these sales, he bought a computer to work on YouTube videos.
2010-2020: 10 years full of fame, glory, and controversies
As mentioned above, his very first video was Minecraft-related. But his career in gaming did not stop there. His early YouTube videos mainly consisted of commentary on video games like Call of Duty and Minecraft. Let’s Play videos featuring Amnesia: The Dark Descent and other independent horror games made PewDiePie a household name. Early on, Felix diversified his output outside video games, creating “Fridays with PewDiePie”, a weekly vlog series. In July 2012, PewDiePie earned his first million followers. Later that year, he joined Maker Studios, a multichannel YouTube network.
Meanwhile, in 2012, 10 years ago, he met Marzia Bisognin (you might recognize her by the name CutiePie Marzia), who moved to Sweden in order to live with Felix. And after 9 years, on August 19, 2019, Felix and Marzia got their happy ending by getting married around friends and family.
PewDiePie overtook all other YouTube channels in terms of subscriber count in August 2013. He beat out the Smosh Brothers for the title, and the channel’s creators made a video to congratulate him. PewDiePie had over 19 million subscribers by the end of 2013; and in 2014, Felix earned an estimated $7.4 million by 2014. This demonstrated the amazing growth of his channel in just four years as it was up $3 million from his expected earnings one year prior. Kjellberg claimed he had grown “extremely tired” of people asking him about his pay.
When YouTube Red, the ad-free subscription service, was introduced a year later, the company revealed it was developing an exclusive program with Kjellberg called “Scare PewDiePie”. The show debuted in 2016, and it showed Felix exploring locations inspired by scary video games he had previously played.
But Felix’s mischief cost him in 2017. Nine of his films between August 2016 and February 2017 contained “anti-Semitic jokes or Nazi imagery”, according to a Wall Street Journal article. One of those films included two men brandishing a sign that read, “Death to All Jews”, who were being paid by PewDiePie — and that is the tip of the iceberg and a very dark age for Felix. Disney and YouTube severed their connections with Felix as a result of the WSJ investigation. The creator network Kjellberg belonged to, Maker Studios was owned by Disney, which deemed his videos to be “inappropriate”. YouTube canceled “Scare PewDiePie” season two and dropped Kjellberg from its top advertising program.
Felix’s history of making Nazi jokes did not hold up well over time, especially following the deadly Charlottesville white supremacist demonstration in 2017. Felix vowed to quit making fun of the Nazis, declaring he had “nothing to do with these people”, and was shocked to discover he had “actually got grouped in” with them. Before the year was over, though, Felix returned to his offensive video commentary. He shouted a racial slur in a foul-mouthed diatribe while playing PUBG while live-streaming himself. He had previously used the N-word in a video earlier that year, so it was not his first time doing so.
Last but not least, we have the T-Series controversy/rivalry over which YouTube channel was going to hit first the 100 million subscribers milestone. As mentioned above, Felix made an effort to halt T-Series’ explosive expansion after PewDiePie’s devoted supporters launched a significant social media campaign. Hackers encouraged users to “subscribe to PewDiePie” by attacking the Wall Street Journal homepage, smart TVs, and hundreds of printers. Additionally, Mr. Beast from YouTube promoted PewDiePie. “Subscribe to PewDiePie” has become an “all-purpose cultural bat signal for the young and internet-absorbed”, according to The New York Times. Graffiti covering a World War II memorial in New York was done with the slogan.
Then, in March, when it was uttered following the terrorist attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, the phrase “subscribe to PewDiePie” gained further meaning. The alleged shooter is heard encouraging people to “subscribe to PewDiePie” in a live stream video from the incident. Felix declared that hearing his name used during the Christchurch shootings left him “absolutely sickened”. In a YouTube video, Felix implores his followers to stop supporting PewDiePie. “This was made to be fun, but it’s clearly not fun anymore. It is clearly gone too far”, said Felix. A day later, a plane flying over New York City carried a sign that read, “Subscribe to PewDiePie”. The result: PewDiePie lost ground to T-Series in March, then in May, T-Series passed PewDiePie to become the first YouTube channel to reach 100 million subscribers.
What PewDiePie is up now
Felix posted a Q&A video in November 2020 where he looked back on his time on YouTube. He stated throughout the video that he considers himself to be “retired” from YouTube and has felt this way since earlier in the year. After then, he intermittently but frequently continued to publish videos to the network.
A distribution agreement between Felix and the content production business Jellysmack was signed in January 2021. In accordance with the agreement, Jellysmack will distribute Kjellberg’s video to a Facebook Watch audience after optimizing it. Felix still made his YouTube debuts despite now having his content published on the Facebook platform. Felix posted a song titled “Coco” on February 14 in response to Cocomelon, a children’s channel that had been gaining subscribers for years and was adding around two million new ones each month. Felix made it clear that the parents of the kids who appeared in the music video had given their consent and that they had been given a clean version of the lyrics to mime while they were being photographed. Later, YouTube removed the video after claiming that it had broken their rules regarding kid safety and harassment. Felix claimed he “[did not] actually care about Cocomelon” and did not want to “get out of control” with the channel to escalate as his prior conflict with T-Series had.
Felix and his wife Marzia relocated to Japan in May 2022 from England. Following the relocation, a lot of his output was focused on “vlogs about daily living in Tokyo”. When he announced his “retirement” from the platform in September, Felix addressed the change in his upload philosophy, saying that he now chooses to share videos for enjoyment, much as he did when he first started uploading videos.
My personal point of view
PewDiePie, or as I prefer to call him by his first name, has had his phases. Some might say he was being sexist, racist, and so on “for the content”. At some point in his YouTube life, that was true. His gaming career was based on his reactions to horror games, and memes, as well as commentary and vlogs. And yes, he has been disrespectful sometimes; but that does not make him a bad person. He has donated a plethora of money to charities and is quite close to his audience. I personally have been watching his videos since 2011 and, like every single person on Earth, he has made mistakes; but he has apologized. And most importantly, he has matured. He is peacefully living his life with his wife. I could have written so many more things about his life and his career mostly, but I would need another article for that.
To conclude, what I wish to say to every fan of Pewds: stay awesome, bros, and let us celebrate Felix’s 33rd birthday!
References
- YouTuber PewDiePie’s ‘honeymoon phase’ brings positive vibes to Japan content, japantimes.co.jp, Available here
- ‘Why should I quit?’: PewDiePie explains why he stayed on YouTube after his ‘retirement’, dotesports.com, Available here
- Who is PewDiePie? The undisputed King of YouTube, ginx.tv, Available here
- PewDiePie’s YouTube channel, youtube.com, Available here
