PewDiePie’s Fake Patreon is kind of depressing

At this point, it’s pretty much common knowledge that PewDiePie makes millions of dollars a year. So wouldn’t it be funny if he made a Patreon?

Well, earlier this week, PewDiePie did exactly that — well, a fake Patreon — and the next day, he made a video advertising it. The Patreon was ridiculous and over-the-top, with rewards like receiving Edgar, his signature pug, for donating $7 per month.

Despite the campaign being totally bogus, though, PewDiePie has managed to accrue nearly $3,000 over the span of a few days. Wanting to know if some of these donors genuinely didn’t recognize that PewDiePie was joking, I looked into the community section of the Patreon page to see if I could get some insight.

When I clicked there, I noticed that there a few commenters not-so-subtly implored people to donate to a smaller creator (i.e. them) rather than PewDiePie the millionaire. Now, normally, I find this sort of shameless self-promotion annoying, as I know many people do.

But for some reason, all those comments just made me sad. Well, not enough to donate any money to them, but enough to make me feel a little bad for not donating. I wasn’t quite sure why I felt this way — after all, I’ve seen countless people obnoxiously promote themselves in the comments section of pretty much every major YouTuber. So why was this so different?

Well, most comments-section promoters are people who have a low subscriber count (which I’m defining as less than 5k), so it could be that they just want some more people to check out what they’ve produced. Their calls to action don’t necessarily mean that they’re after the green stuff.

But to beg for attention the same way on Patreon when you only have less than 5k subscribers? It shows that the creator was thinking about making money from the start.

Now, just to be clear, I have no problem with people making money on Patreon. I think it’s a great service that can help people pursue their dreams full-time. But many of the most popular creators on YouTube (and on other sites) started out the same way — they just wanted to make videos for fun. Making money was just a cool perk.

So it’s one thing to start a channel for fun and then a year or two in you realize that you might be able to be a YouTuber full-time if you start a Patreon. It’s another thing entirely when you create a YouTube account and expect to make money right off the bat.

I admit, I’m a hypocrite for criticizing this behavior — I started a channel l for purely commercial reasons a little over a year ago. I was unsure what I wanted to do after graduation, and I thought that making a YouTube channel would be a fun way to make money. I was constantly thinking about what other people wanted to see, rather than what I wanted to make. And I realize now that that was the wrong way to go about starting a successful channel because at the time I lacked a certain passion that every successful YouTuber has.

It was that passion that these creators had that made me fall in love with the Internet video scene in the aughts. You knew that they wanted to make videos just to show people their creations and what they can do. And you also knew that they were working on their videos in their own free time — many of them were students or had a full-time job.

So seeing all of these people so shamelessly begging others for money made me feel that this passion is dying, replaced with a desire to make as much money as possible.

Huh. To think this somewhat bleak article was inspired by a PewDiePie video.