YouTube celebrity Felix Kjellberg (PewDiePie) makes excellent living playing video games

OHMYGOSSIP — This guy makes millions playing video games on YouTube! Swedish video maker PewDiePie — real name Felix Kjellberg ( Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg) — runs YouTube’s most subscribed channel, with more than 26million followers.  Watching people play and comment on video games on YouTube is a thing. Since 2010, Mr. Kjellber has listed his occupation as YouTube celebrity and video game commentator, and he makes an ungodly amount of money doing it.

These stats are pretty mind-blowing considering there is no singing, dancing, fancy effects, or fancy anything in a run-of-the-mill PewDiePie video. Kjellberg works mainly in the “Let’s Play” genre. A Let’s Play video documents a playthrough of a video game with simultaneous commentary provided by the gamer. The playthrough of the video game is shown as screenshots or video. (Showing video is a gray area as far as copyright issues are concerned.) 

In many of PewDiePie’s Let’s Play videos, a “facecam” showing Kjellberg wearing headphones and narrating the gameplay into a microphone is superimposed onto the main screen, which shows the game being played. A Let’s Play video is not a strategy guide or walkthrough. It focuses instead on the gamer’s subjective experience of the game and usually includes humorous and critical commentary, and, in Kjellberg’s case, a lot of profanity. The channel is not about providing smart commentary on hardcore gamer’s games, either.

Here are the titles of the most popular videos on his channel: “A Funny Montage,” “Funny Moments of Gaming,” “Happy Wheels Funny Moments Montage #3,” and the 33-second “Harlem Shake Fail,” in which Kjellberg wears girl’s underwear, dances provocatively until he is caught by a woman who is possibly his girlfriend.”

The chance to earn money, let alone a living, by playing video games was an adolescent fantasy until YouTube launched its Partner Program in 2007. It allows eligible YouTube users to make money through Google AdSense, which runs targeted commercials alongside user-generated video. Users who join the partner program get 55 percent of advertising revenues—the amount determined by the type of ad, its price, and how often the video is viewed—while YouTube keeps the remaining 45 percent. A few hundred views per month hardly generates pocket change; tens of thousands might pay the rent.

Kjellberg describes himself as just a Swedish guy who likes to make people laugh and who wants to share gaming moments on YouTube with his bros… Well, anyway, depending on the number of videos viewed, Mr. Kjellberg makes anywhere from $140,000 to $1.4 million per month as a YouTube star and video game commentator. How cool is that?

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Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, born 24 October 1989, better known by his online alias PewDiePie, is a Swedish video game commentator on YouTube. PewDiePie specializes in Let’s Play videos of the horror and action video game genres. His channel is one of the fastest growing YouTube channels, having grown from 3.5 million subscribers to 18 million in 2013. Since August 2013, PewDiePie’s channel has been the most subscribed channel on YouTube, being surpassed briefly in November and December 2013, by YouTube’s Spotlight channel. Holding the title in an uninterrupted manner since 23 December 2013, the channel has reached over 26 million subscribers, as of April 2014.