YouTube has a new record. PewDiePie and his channel has become the first ever to break the 50 million subscriber barrier. What is also significant about this figure, is the fact the Swedish YouTuber promised to delete his channel once he reached this landmark total. It turns out he was lying, (sort of) as what he did was delete his second channel Jack Septiceye 2 rather than his massive PewDiePie channel.
Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg aka PewDiePie appears to have been having a bit of fun with the media, as he describes the whole exercise to have been “a joke.”
It seems that the YouTube sensation was looking for a way to break the magical 50 million subscriber mark sooner, rather than later. He thanks fans for helping him to reach the total before saying, “You know how you make a joke, and it just blows up way bigger than you could ever imagine…” He apparently finds it amusing that the media jumped on the story, and reported it so widely.
He does fulfill his promise of deleting his channel, but not the channel that everybody assumed he would. His second channel was created simply to hate on his friend and fellow YouTuber, Jack Septiceye. It is that which has seen removal from the video sharing website.
The Swede, whose annual earnings are reported to be around $12 million, was clearly just fooling around. The kind of success that he has achieved is not reached overnight. Even if the issues he described in the original rant video which sparked the story are true, he is clearly not willing to risk so much for the sake of problems with the YouTube platform.