See, a lot of Youtubers are shifting to Twitch where they can simply make more money. Twitch is part of Bezos' empire and he happily hands 50% of subscriber money over to every single streamer who has over 1,000 subscribers. £2.49 x 1,000 = £2,490 a month. More than enough for someone to live off of as a let's player.
The Yogscast, for example, has basically been saved via running up their Twitch channel, and has enough of a healthy subs count they can pay the streamers who use the main channel wages.
Youtube has been utterly murdered through a combination of both adblockers (due to Youtube making adverts over the top obnoxious) and lawyers pouncing on every last slight copyright and maybe copyright violation it can smell, using roving bots, some of which don't even use audio to check before content IDing.
Youtube's own responces to these actions has been utterly shit. They've not bunged a bit of cash to make AdBlock go away from its own browsers, they've not toned down the endless adverts by getting rid of the ones which makes someone's browsers turn to laggy garbage.
This is why services like Vessel, etc will wind up sneaking away with more and more of the site's stuff. It really would only take someone, like Bezos, to snap his fingers and create a similar service with a 50% cut rate and less obtrusive advertising.
Pewds himself, is basically resetting his channel to piss off youtube because he's long been heralded as the "King" he's known by millions, has made millions off of his channel and, even if he just recreates his channel it does send a pretty harsh message to Youtube.
The main reason why is the subscriber bug does appear to be real, but is only effecting smaller players. The "big names" such as himself are not seeing their subscriber counts cut, suggesting that Youtube is keeping the count for their "big talent" high to continue to draw more viewers in.
