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What someone who worked closely with PewDiePie thinks about Disney and YouTube dropping him

After a Wall Street Journal report about anti-Semitic jokes in his videos, PewDiePie was dropped by Disney and YouTube. Here's what a colleague thinks.

PewDiePie's response video to The Wall Street Journal.

In his YouTube videos, PewDiePie is boisterous and goofy, playing video games and swearing enough to make a sailor nod in approval.

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But in person, 27-year-old Felix Kjellberg is much more introverted, according to a colleague who worked closely with him on "Scare PewDiePie," his recently canceled show on YouTube's Red premium video service.

"He was very charismatic and likable," but introverted at the same time, this person said. "Felix was much more reserved in real life."

When Kjellberg would be recognized by people outside the production, his demeanor would change, and he'd become a bit shy and quiet, this person recalled.

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I'm not going to try to parse the exact extent of the overlap between Kjellberg the person and PewDiePie the character. But this anecdote serves as a good reminder that PewDiePie is indeed a character — one that has been richly rewarded by a YouTube community that likes characters who push boundaries.

PewDiePie is YouTube's biggest star, with over 53 million subscribers and a reported income of about $15 million in 2016.

Last week, however, he had a dramatic fall from grace after a Wall Street Journal report concluded he had posted nine videos since August that "include anti-Semitic jokes or Nazi imagery."

YouTube has canceled his premium show and kicked him off the Google Preferred advertising network, while Disney, whose Maker Studios had a joint venture with him, has severed business ties.

Kjellberg responded in an explosive video in which he called the report "an attack by the media to try and discredit me, to try and decrease my influence and my economic worth." While Kjellberg admitted that one video was a joke gone too far, he defended his right to make jokes about any subject and flipped a middle finger at The Journal.

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While Kjellberg may have lost lucrative deals with his biggest brand partners, he doesn't appear to have suffered any drop in subscribers since the report. He remains the world's most popular YouTuber.

In retrospect, it seems inevitable that a scandal of this type would emerge in the rapidly changing world of YouTube stardom. YouTube stars are now getting their own shows on traditional TV, Netflix, and HBO, not to mention on newer streaming services like YouTube Red and Verizon's Go90.

They are superstars, and many are now intertwined with networks — both TV and streaming — as well as companies like Maker Studios that help develop and promote shows for the likes of Kjellberg.

But among YouTube stars who get a "premium" show, most, like Kjellberg, continue to make their own videos on YouTube that speak directly to their fans and are outside a brand's control. They want to continue to increase and serve their audiences. And brand partners like Disney don't want them to stop building their fan base.

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The problem for the Disneys of the world is that one way many YouTube stars have climbed the ranks of popularity, snagging millions of subscribers, is through unfiltered, raw personality.

"I like to push boundaries," Kjellberg said in his video response to The Journal. It's certainly true, and he's not the only one. A relative strength of YouTube as a platform is that people can say whatever they want.

This came into focus during a recent Business Insider interview with Fullscreen's senior vice president of programming, Scott Reich. Fullscreen helps promote 75,000-plus YouTubers and has its own Netflix-style subscription service — though it is not affiliated with PewDiePie.

"We want [stars] to have a polarizing point of view … a point of view in general," Reich said.

Strong opinions and personalities — or characters — are what makes YouTube special, but they can end up being a liability for brands like Disney.

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"Although Felix has created a following by being provocative and irreverent, he clearly went too far in this case, and the resulting videos are inappropriate," Maker Studios told Business Insider in a statement explaining why the company dropped him.

Even within that statement, you can see the opposing forces that led to the current situation.

"Maker has all these young kids that have grown up creating content without any kind of parameters," said Kjellberg's colleague from "Scare PewDiePie." Someone was eventually going to step over the line and lose the support of Disney. It happened to be Kjellberg, the ecosystem's biggest star.

One question in the fallout from the Journal report is who gets hurt financially in this scenario.

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Both Disney and YouTube will no longer reap any of the revenue that comes from partnering with PewDiePie, but that was their own business calculus. They made the wrong bet on a star and have decided to protect themselves from any potential damage to their brands.

Kjellberg, likewise, will no doubt lose some income. But he still has 53 million followers and has not been barred from YouTube. It's unclear how much of the income lost from brands he can build back up, or whether he even wants to. In Kjellberg's response video, he said he "generally had very little interest" in the money.

Then there's the third-party production company that made "Scare PewDiePie," which was about to air its second season. Multiple people with knowledge of YouTube Red deals said that the company almost certainly would be paid in full. But that would mean that a show many people worked on for months will never see the light of day.

"Bummed and frustrated about the whole situation," another member of the "Scare PewDiePie" team told Business Insider.

What remains to be seen is whether this incident will have a chilling effect on the willingness of established brands to tie their fortunes, in some way, to stars with a track record of controversial humor, or whether they will seek greater control over the YouTube output of the stars they bet millions on.

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