[Seoul=Newsis] Intern Reporter Jung Poong-gi = A major American YouTuber with 17.3 million subscribers recently made headlines by asking people to stop donating to him during a live broadcast.
On the 10th, a video titled “I’m Turning It Off” was uploaded to the channel of the YouTuber ‘Penguinz0′ (Cr1TiKaL), known for covering various games and issues.
In the video, he announced that he would deactivate YouTube channel memberships and Super Chat. However, due to the unique system on Twitch, he requested viewers to voluntarily cancel their paid subscriptions.
He added, “The reason I’m turning off all donation systems is that I no longer want people to give me money. I want to put a full stop to this flow.”
He also said, “Top streamers hardly need to make a living from fans’ donations,” explaining that “most of their earnings come from advertising revenue.”
Additionally, he requested, “If you have so much money that you can’t handle it, please donate to an organization doing good work instead of to me,” emphasizing that “I’ve been saying for a long time that ‘my content is free to consume’ and ‘there’s no need to donate,’ but people still supported me. So now I’m removing the option altogether from the table.”
He later clarified in another video that he had no intention of reverting the donation system. Having already made enough money from his YouTube activities, he stated, “From now on, I only want time from my fans, not money.”
He also confirmed that he has earned a gross income of about 35 million dollars (approximately 50 billion won) so far, and added, “I started YouTube in 2007, but I only began earning money seriously from 2018.”
He expressed his thoughts, saying, “I truly believe I’ve been lucky. I don’t consider myself special and I’ve been saying that for a long time. I still think the same.”