He actively and frequently posts new videos and interacts with his subscribers in different social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Omegle. As his popularity increased, he started to gain an audience of his own and created a community-based audience by calling his audience his ‘bros’ or brothers, suggesting some sort of closeness between performers, and audience. PewDiePie started as an audience himself to the game company by reviewing new released games. PewDiePie has gained more than 31 million subscribers in Youtube not to mention people who watched his video without subscribing to his channel.
But as we can see from the case of PewDiePie, the audience that he has gained is not particularly a small one. As stated by Shayla Thiel-Stern, that new media, in this case the Internet, is a new space in which to find an audience, albeit a relatively small one. With the growing of the Internet, the audience changed alongside with it. So in this blog we will not only examine how PewDiePie is related to the ideas of producer and audience, but we will also discuss the way in which PewDiePie interacts with and uses his Bro-Army. This phenomenon has already been researched within the field of new media audience scholarship and besides that Thiel-Stern states: “we must question not only the interactive media audience’s dual role- as producer and audience- but also what it means that this audience is constantly aware of its new role and of its creative potential”. We want to see how PewDiePie’s career can be related to the notions of audience and producer. He started commenting games on Youtube in 2010 and now he has a whole, so-called, Bro-Army of fans. In this blog we want to focus on the case-study of Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg who has become popular on Youtube under the name PewDiePie. She states that: “the new media have almost fully collapsed the differences between audience and producer.” The audience is not anymore a passive receiver of information but also, as said, a producer and besides that the audience is aware of its own audience as well.
Shayla Thiel-Stern discusses the “New Media Audiences” in her text Beyond the Active Audience. All this new media provide the former audience with simple ways to become producers of cultural content. Everyone can become a weblebrity through the internet and obtain their “fifteen minutes of fame”.
Upload a nice video or a great photo on Facebook, or on Youtube and the ‘likes’ or followers will confirm your popularity. Becoming famous is nowadays much easier than twenty years ago.