PewDiePie

You won’t believe if we say that this guy literally left his studies to become a YouTube personality. After dropping out from college he started a YouTube channel. Felix Kjellberg began his YouTube page ‘PewDiePie’ on 29th April 2010 with a Minecraft playthrough video showing a zombie that had spawned in a Minecraft. After a few months of this video, he began uploading playthroughs of ‘Call Of Duty: Black Ops’, ‘Amnesia: The Dark Descent’ and ‘Dead Space 2’. During the initial days, PewDiePie was known for playing horror and action video games.

It was in 2011 that his fandom increased. In October 2011, he created a single topic blog ‘Fuck Yeah PewDiePie’ for the fans of his videos. In the span of eight months, his YouTube channel had over 1, 4000 videos uploaded. Those videos included playthroughs of around 40 games and 40 Amnesia custom stories which were sent by his fans. Felix can be crowned as the ‘Social Media Giant’. We only talked about his YouTube channel; outside YouTube too he is the king! He enjoys over 7 million Facebook likes, 8 million followers in Twitter and then again 10 million in Instagram, and we are still counting!

The characters of his videos are very funny. While watching his videos, you can notice that our focus would divert to the commentaries and reactions he gives while playing the video games. Due to this his videos fall under the set of ‘Let’s Play’, a series of videos of screenshots, documenting a playthrough of video game. This usually includes the commentary by the gamer.

Let’s check on the graph of his subscribers. Trust us it will amuse you. After creating his account in 2010, in December 2011 his channel had around 60,000 subscribers. By the time he earned 700,000 subscribers, he was asked to speak at the Nonick Conference in 2012. The same year by July he had 1 million subscribers, it only took him two more months to reach 2 million. Not surprising at all, in October 2012, OpenSlate ranked the ‘PewDiePie’ channel as the number 1 channel on YouTube.

Talking about his earnings, with these many subscribers, came the commercial success too! According to Swedish newspaper ‘Expresen’, this guy made $7.4 million in 2014 and was named one of the most influential people on Internet in the year 2015. Considering the size of both his subscribers and number of videos ‘Let’s Play’ creates, to be precise 2,300 videos were created by him, he is absolutely worth it.

The first thing that makes him so special is he is loved by everyone, irrespective of age and gender. On the occasion of his book launch in Manhattan, fifteen hundred teenagers gathered to get a glimpse of him. According to http://www.rollingstone.com/, a 21 year old girl said that she arrived from New York early in the morning around 4 am, after driving 33 hours from Texas.

That’s actually nothing; she also mentions about an elderly women who was standing next to her, who along with her niece flew from Peru. For record! The distance between Peru and Manhattan is nearly 5,554 km. Now time to meet a 16 year old fan, Shane. Shane Flanagan took a bus from New Jersey, the previous day of the occasion and camped outside a patio umbrella. And that has its pluses; he was the first on the line! We told you, PewDiePie is loved globally. Spider killan A video posted by PewDiePie (@pewdiepie) on Jul 30, 2016 at 1:54pm PDT

Another interesting factor is his videos. In his videos he laughs, screams, swears and goofs around as if he were hanging around with his best friend. And then he would talk to the props that appear in the game as if it is a living object. Want an example? The first character he created was a golden statue in a bookshelf and he named it ‘Stephano’, who had a French ascent. It was introduced in an Amnesia story titled ‘Abduction’. Over a period of time, this object became less fearless. The funny part is where; Stephano would advise PewDiePie whenever he is scared or distracted. However after the advice session, PewDiePie would immediately place Stephano to the nearest shelf and ask him to shut up. The gamer didn’t achieve 4.1 billion views in 2014 for nothing!

And then his answer when enquired about his earnings of $7.4 is exactly why he is successful. Sitting in front of a computer, playing games and screaming all day is not an easy task. Though it seems easy it isn’t in real. In his video ‘Lets Talk About Money” he says “People…thought it was unfair. They thought I just I sit on my ass all day and I just yell at the screen over here- which is true- but there is so much more to it.” Here he talked directly to the camera, he didn’t sound defensive and neither was he screaming. He sounded truthful and agreeable. He also added saying “If you think someone is funnier. Go refresh their video and watch it over and over and over again. Because that is how we get paid”.

And then there is the famous “Bro Army”. For all those who are wondering about Bro Army. Let us enlighten you; Bro Army is the name of fanbase of PewDiePie. Felix likes to call his fans as ‘Bros’. As the Bro Army is all about PewDiePie, his fans consider him as the leader of this group. People in this army are usually engaged in brofisting, as PewDiePie would give brofist to the fans at the end of his videos. Unlike other YouTube personalities he isn’t just playing games, he interacts with his audience. Bro fist! Soon you will be able to talk to #pewdiebot. What will you talk about or say? :-) A video posted by PewDiePie (@pewdiepie) on Jul 2, 2016 at 3:32pm PDT

In spite of fame, Felix is also a controversial gamer. He had to face the rage of other gamers who are displeased with his content. He even had to disable certain YouTube comments on his channel due to negativity and spam issues.

The news that spread like wild fire was about the suspension of PewDiePie’s Twitter account. On 30thAugust, 2016 PewDiePie unverified himself from Twitter as he found the notification very annoying. The same day he retweeted a tweet of satirical news site, ‘Sky News’ that jokingly suggested that he was unverified because he had ties with the terrorist group ISIS. He then jokingly tweeted he and his fellow YouTube gamer ‘jackseptic eye’ had been unverified on twitter due to their ties with ISIS. Following day his twitter account was momentarily suspended. Though he at that time had lost 8 million followers, they are all back now and the account is active, but the blue tick mark is still missing.