YouTube's biggest star is trying out Twitch

PewDiePie is testing the waters outside YouTube.
PewDiePie is testing the waters outside YouTube.
Image: stephen Morrison/Epa/REX/Shutterstock

PewDiePie would like some cash. 

The YouTube star made this point again and again in a recent video in which he played Minecraft and lamented advertisers abandoning YouTube. Also — and he says this is coincidental — PewDiePie announced he's starting a show on Twitch, a YouTube rival. His money issues might have something to do with it.

PewDiePie — or Felix Kjellberg, if you prefer his real name — insists he was thinking of moving to Twitch before "anything." That's presumably a reference to both advertisers leaving YouTube and Kjellberg's own advertising woes that began after several of his videos were revealed to contain Nazi images and anti-Semitic remarks

Advertisers have jumped off YouTube's ship because the video service can't guarantee their ads won't show up next to racist videos. Kjellberg finds this sort of silly, but says he understands. 

"I understand that advertisers needs to feel like they're spending money and it doesn't show up on racist videos," he said toward the end of the video in which he announced his Twitch show. "I understand that 100 percent. Like, that's a terrible thing."


"But the whole thing is just so massively overblown," he went on. "It's so typical for these things to just get way bigger than they should be in the media. Talking first-hand, here."

Kjellberg's personal trouble with YouTube began after The Wall Street Journal published an article revealing anti-Semitic remarks and Nazi imagery in several of his videos, including one in which a man holds a sign that reads "Death to all Jews." 

Google (which owns YouTube) canceled the second season of Kjellberg's reality show and yanked him off its premium ad service that allowed Kjellberg to rake in cash. A couple months later and he's off to Twitch which, again, he says is a coincidence. 

"I decided this before, OK?" he says in a YouTube video titled "YOUTUBEISOVERPARTY." "Before anything. So don't read it the wrong way."

His new live-streamed talk show is called Best Club. It started on April 9 and will run every Sunday at 11 a.m. ET, though he says there's a chance it'll run more than once a week. 

In the first episode, he asked that viewers please donate. 

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