Ralph is such a fat enigma. Everything he says is the opposite of what he does. That's fine, whatever. I've long since accepted he's a two-faced hoe. The money angle of things really baffles me, though, since he likes to brag about all the bank he makes. He even goes out of his way to mention how he does everything for money. Which is fine, because everyone does this, but if that was really the case then he has options that could be leveraged to make a shit ton more than he currently does.
1. Claims to love the haters, but aggressively bans them. This does nothing but reduce his engagement. Less retweets, less memes, less troll callers. = Less money.
2. Has been dabbling in IRL stuff again, first with IP2 and now mostly solo. He doesn't have speaker donations on and has mods sweeping comments up. Why? What is the point of doing IRL content if people can't fuck with you? That's literally the whole point. He saw it first hand with warski/failure so he should know the rules. Does he just like being made a fool of for free?
I bet he could make some serious bank if he just let people fuck with him. Whatever he makes now would pale in comparison to what he could be making if he stopped being so thin-skinned. He doesn't even have to let things get ridiculous. IP2 life-ruining chaos isn't needed. In the early days of the killstream he would entertain hate callers and have fun with hecklers.
Since his online relevance is constantly shrinking, I wonder if he'll eventually say fuck it and just become a hate-whore and let people screw with him. Making minimum wage (if not less) can't be very fun when you know there's a shit load of cash to be made by embracing your haters and rolling with the punches. Even if he is somehow making a decent amount of money, it could nevertheless be doubled if not tripled if he loosened the reigns a bit. His cadre of goldstar callers, such as rand, came into being because he let weirdos on the show to talk smack.
Tightening up the call segment was always one of the biggest mistakes he made IMO, because that reduced the chances of finding new entertaining weirdos to fill your quest slots with.