YouTube Star PewDiePie Responds To Comments From “Haters” After Making £4.8 Million

    Felix Kjellberg read out some of the comments he received after a Swedish newspaper reported he doubled his annual earnings in 2014.

    This is PewDiePie, aka Felix Kjellberg, the 25-year-old owner of the world's biggest YouTube account, who makes millions from pre-roll ads on his madcap videos.

    According to an annual report seen by Swedish newspaper Expressen, his company made pre-tax profits of 63 million krona last year, or £4.8 million.

    The Swedish star lives in Brighton with his girlfriend and his videos are a mixture of video gameplay commentaries and general zany humour. One video, a compilation of moments from other videos, has been viewed 67 million times.

    After five years of making videos, the channel has been viewed more than 9 billion times.

    PewDie Productions was formed in 2012, and it reported first-year sales of 7.2 million Swedish krona (£550,000), before making 29.6 million (£2.25 million) in 2013.

    Some of the money PewDiePie generates goes back to YouTube, and he's signed to the Disney-owned content network / talent agency Maker Studios, which takes a cut, plus he donates some money to charity.

    Many of PewDiePie fans, whom he calls "bros", are young teens who spend their time playing the games he features.

    But not everyone is a fan. The news of his profits sent some people into a frenzy, as he described in a video posted last night.

    View this video on YouTube

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    He read out a few of his favourite comments about the story in the past few days.

    He said: "A lot of people also I saw were very, very angry. They thought it was unfair, that I just sit on my ass all day and yell at the screen over here. Which is true."

    "But there's so much more to it. Haters gonna hate, right? I really think money doesn't make you happy – I'm just as happy now as I was five years ago."

    One person argued that the armed forces should be getting paid more.

    Not everyone seemed to know where he was from.

    Without denying that he earns millions in advertising revenue, Kjellberg stressed that money wasn't that important to him.

    "Money is a topic that I've purposefully tried to avoid while I've been making videos," he said. "I just feel like it's not important to anyone.

    "Don't get me wrong though, I don't hate money – I'm not going to pretend it doesn't matter to me, because it matters to everyone."

    He said that he started making videos five years ago, when he was broke, before quitting college and getting on a hot dog stand so he could spend more time doing them.

    "There was no one big in gaming and I didn't know you could make money out of it," he said. "So it was never a career I quit college to pursue, it's just something I love to do, and here we are five years later and it's exploded.

    "What people don't really think about until it's in their face is I have 9 billion views and that translates to something – there's ads on my videos and I make money out of those."

    It's now an established rule of the internet that when someone makes a lot of money, there will be haters.