How Much PewDiePie Really Lost During His Break

There's no denying that Felix Kjellberg — better known as PewDiePie to the masses — is a fixture of the YouTube community. He's spent years of his life creating content for the platform, and has amassed a staggering 103 million subscribers in that span. The world was a bit taken aback when, late last year, PewDiePie announced he'd be taking an extended break from YouTube, presumably to catch his breath and focus on personal matters. That break lasted from Jan. 15 until today, when PewDiePie made his triumphant return to the land of "like, subscribe, and leave a comment below."

We know PewDiePie was making boatloads of money on YouTube prior to his break. We know this short hiatus likely caused a decline in the number of views his videos received. And we're pretty certain taking some time off also slowed his subscriber growth quite a bit. The big question on our minds, however, is this: how much money did PewDiePie lose when he briefly stepped away from YouTube? How much cash could this prolific content creator have left on the table? We decided to crunch some numbers to figure it all out. While they're not going to be one-hundred percent accurate, we feel they're at least a good estimation of the revenue PewDiePie missed out on.

You may be very surprised to learn that, despite being gone over a month, PewDiePie still made bank in a very big way.

According to the website SocialBlade, PewDiePie still managed to snag a metric ton of video views while taking some time off. We're only able to look at numbers for the past 30 days, but in that period of time, PewDiePie's YouTube channel still clocked over 100 million total views, and averaged roughly three or four million views per day. That is not an insubstantial figure. In fact, if you look at SocialBlade's estimate for the amount of money PewDiePie was able to make in the last month, you'll find it rings up somewhere between $26,800 and $429,100. For someone who didn't upload a single piece of new content, that is an absurd sum, even if PewDiePie landed on the lower end of the spectrum.

Now here's where things get very interesting. Prior to PewDiePie's break, another website called Vlogger Gear decided to break down the numbers and figure out just how much the YouTuber made per month while uploading videos. The result in that instance was roughly $940,000, which comes pretty darn close to $1 million. So even though PewDiePie managed to make a handsome profit from his YouTube channel while he was gone, the lack of new content going up did harm to his bottom line. His vacation might have cost him between $500,000 and $1 million, and if you ask us, that's a lot to pay for a little bit of time off.

All this data does shed some light on why PewDiePie keeps doing what he does, though. You may wonder why someone who makes millions of dollars per year would keep at it, even though — as one expert stated in Forbes – "He would get a check for the rest of his life with his library of content." It's because not creating content would turn those millions into thousands, and when you own two homes and travel between two countries, you'd much rather have more money coming in than less money.

Still, it would be entirely possible for PewDiePie to walk away from the game if he decided he'd had enough. Based on the numbers from the past month — and presuming PewDiePie's back catalog of content could keep bringing in views — the YouTuber would stand to make somewhere between $321,600 and $5,149,200 per year. That is nothing to sneeze at. The President of the United States earns a salary of $400,000 per year, and they're entrusted with the nuclear codes! All PewDiePie would have to do is make sure his YouTube channel stays online, and make sure he can still sign his name to keep cashing those checks. That does not sound like a bad gig at all.

But all that is a topic for another time in the far-off future. For now, it appears PewDiePie is back to doing what he does best, and it doesn't look like he's planning to quit anytime soon. It's possible this world-famous YouTube creator could take another break at some point, and that he'd once again take a financial hit similar to the one he experienced this past month. But we don't see PewDiePie throwing in the towel for good — he has a few million reasons not to.