PewDiePie
Family
PewDiePie has a sister and nephew. He married his long-term his long-term girlfriend on August 20, 2019. The have two pugs and an albino hedgehog.
Name Origins
He chose ‘pew’ from the shooting sound that lasers make and added ‘die’ to form PewDie. However, he forgot his password to his PewDie account one day and so created a new one, called “PewDiePie,” because he would sometimes say ‘Pew Pie,’ when he shot a target when he was playing games.
Gaming Origins
When he was a child, PewDiePie got picked on for being short. He therefore spent a lot of his time playing video games, rather than interacting with other children. He dreamed of producing video games when he grew up. But when he was a teenager, he realized that that was a lot of work and decided against it. He went to college to study business but wasn’t so interested in it. He spent most of his free time playing World of Warcraft during that time. In his second year of college, he was considering dropping out of college because of his disinterest and got a job at a burger kiosk. His parents were obviously less than thrilled.
In 2010, he decided to create video content instead therefore saved up and bought himself a powerful PC to produce high quality content on and started recording, as well as a webcam. For a while, he wasn’t really making any money from streaming. His parents refused to support him when he actually dropped out. This was very risky, as he only had 30,000 subscribers when he dropped out. While he had wanted YouTube to become a career, he didn’t really think that it would work out for him.
He met his Italian fiancé, Marzia online in mid-2011 after a friend of hers sent her a link to one of his montages while he was still in college. They started chatting on Facebook and began dating online. They met in person in October 2011 and moved in together in 2012. He worked as a harbor captain for a while before he was fired and began focusing on fulltime content creation. Marzia was also a YouTuber for a while but decided to stop to focus on her fashion career in 2018.
Professional Gaming
Over 2012, his ‘Let’s Play,’ reaction montages and IRL videos slowly gained traction and his channel grew substantially until he reached 1 million subscribers by June of that year. He had doubled that number by the next month. When he finally got his partnership, he started being more consistent with content creation. He attributes his success to creating horror games and other silly games instead of focusing on Call of Duty, the way most other streamers were at the time.
After a while, he was emotionally exhausted from horror games and started playing Happy Wheels as well. His channel is not appropriate for children. He signed an exclusive contract with YouTube gaming in May 2020 and has been streaming exclusively on that platform since then.
Income
PewDiePie stated that he made ~4 Million USD in 2013 from. It is likely that he earns more than this now. Forbes guessed his 2018 earnings to be at $15.5 million USD. We could therefore estimate that he has made at least $48 million USD since 2013. His Twitch subscriber count isn’t public, so his earnings from there cannot be included in this estimate.
Streaming Hours
PewDiePie doesn’t have a set schedule but continues to upload videos almost daily. He randomly livestreams on Twitch and doesn’t save his content.
Quotes
-
[I believe that my success can be attributed to] the consistency that I had,... having a close connection with my fans,… doing something unique,… and being a unique person.
-
honestly, they're all the same. Don't spend money on a nice microphone.