Get this, you guys, one of YouTube’s biggest stars almost deleted his entire channel after hitting 50 million subscribers! That’s right, in his most recent video, PewDiePie — whose real name is Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg — revealed that back in 2016, he almost said goodbye to the video streaming platform for good after feeling “overworked.”
During the 10-minute video, the 30-year-old celebrated his 10-year anniversary with YouTube, and looked back at some of his old uploads. While watching a vlog from a trip to Los Angeles to film the “Scare PewDiePie” special, he revealed that the meme in which he jokingly threatened to delete his channel, wasn’t actually a joke at all.
“I don’t know if I said this before… I meme’d it like, ‘Haha, got you,’ but the original idea was intentional, because I just was so done,” he admitted. “I was so overworked. It was way too much.”
That’s not all. Get this — PewDiePie said that at the time, he also missed having a smaller audience and didn’t like the fame he had received.
“I was fed up with being so famous,” he continued. “I just realized I wasn’t enjoying it. It was a time when I wished I had a smaller channel and no one knew who I was, kinda,” he explained. “I missed those times, back in 2012, when it was just me and my audience, and the acceleration and the hype. I felt like I had lost that.”
As fans know, this admission came just a few weeks after the internet star clapped back at critics who judged him for being rich. During a video posted on April 21, 2020, he got super real about his past struggles and shared that, although having money has significantly improved his lifestyle, he’s just as happy as he was when he first started posting videos to YouTube.
“Sometimes, I look back on the times when I was just starting out with YouTube, and I was just making enough to pay my rent each month,” he said. “That’s the kind of time I look back as the most happiest, when me and Marzia [Bisognin] were in Sweden. We didn’t have a lot of money. It wasn’t easy, but we were equally happy then.”
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