Will YouTube’s biggest star move to Facebook?

UPDATED at 17:11 GMT 09 Dec 2016

Last week PewDiePie (A.K.A Felix Avrid Ulf Kjellberg) threatened to delete his YouTube channel once it reached 50 million subscribers.

This insanely-high figure was passed overnight. This morning PewDiePie told Twitter fans he will delete his YouTube channel today at 17:00 GMT.

Big Whoop?

It may have been a non news story a handful of years ago. But Forbes magazine just recognised PewDiePie as the highest-paid YouTube star for the second consecutive year.

With more YouTube subscribers than the entire population of Spain and videos which have generated 13.8 billion video views brands want to work with him on influencer marketing projects and advertisers want their pre roll fronting his videos.

Forbes reports that the eGamer and video ranter amassed an income of $15m for the 12-months to June 2016.

So, will he kill off the golden goose today a tea time? There are four options open to him now.

PewDiePie’s options for future video creation

Do nothing. Keep the channel. Explain the last week away to subscribers as an experiment in click-bait and an exercise of personal amusement.

Cut the channel off and start up another YouTube channel from scratch. Over the last year his video content has increasingly mutated from eGaming into piece-to-camera ranting. This may be an opportunity to forge clear lines between his eGaming content and his video ranting content.

Buy an island somewhere with his reported $30m and retire. The least likely option of the four.

Move to a new video-sharing platform. There are pros and cons for this route. The cons are that he already runs a multichannel network (MCN) within an MCN. Revelmode was launched in January 2016. It is part of the Disney-owned Maker Studio MCN.

The pros? He has a huge fan base which would sit neatly within a YouTube rival’s ambition to become the premier video-sharing platform.

95% of 16-34 year-olds watch video clips online each month. 44% of internet users watch vlogs on a monthly basis.

YouTube is increasingly coming under fire from other platforms pushing video.

Over half of Facebook active users watch videos on the network. The social media monolith is making moves to dominate live streaming video content, too. It is attempting to woo Snapchat, and YouTube influencers to experiment with its Live Video feature.

Linkedin, too, has embraced video for its influencers. The professional network has launched 30-second videos from influencers to capitalise on the B2B market.

What do you think will happen next?

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UPDATE at 17:11 GMT 09 Dec 2016

PewDiePie took option 1 of the 4 options above posting this short vlog a little while ago. Of the four options this was always the most likely – but also the least exciting. Stay tuned.

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This is an abbreviated and modified post to the one I ran earlier today on my personal blog. Read it here. You can also follow me on Twitter. I’d like that.