• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, May 27, 2016

Care and feeding of talent is part of the job of media organizations. You want to keep them happy, and there’s a long history of upset stars who made things difficult for their host networks or studios. Most recently, consider Kelly Ripa, then think of all the other big stars ready to quit because of salaries or other slights.

And then consider, Felix Kjellberg, aka PewDiePie, who has gone off on a rant on YouTube because he has not received his “Diamond Play Button” awarded when a YouTuber reaches 10 million subscribers.

PewDiePie has over 44 million and is the undisputed king of the world over there.  In his latest video titled “Diamond Play Button Unboxing,” he intends to reveal his new plaque to commemorate the feat. instead he begins by taking the package and unveiling... the Silver (100,000 subscribers) and then, the Gold (1 million), which arrived via FedEx, broken.

There is no Diamond Play Button.

In a mock rant --really quite funny, though obscenity-laced--PewDiePie let YouTube have it and issued an ultimatum: “These are my demands. I want four Diamond Play Buttons. I want them delivered by a horse. I want them smothered in glitter--not too much, make it classy. I want the man delivering the packages to be a beautiful, bearded man. And I want it written apology. I want a begged apology.”

He laughs through his diatribe which has been seen over four million times in one day. 

But at one point he says, “I’m legit pissed. I waited so long. I waited so long. I thought once they announced the Diamond Play Button, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s cool. Maybe now I’ll finally get it.’ “ He pauses, grows silent. Fake rain begins to fall. Then, grabbing a megaphone, he shouts, “This ends now. If I don’t have my YouTube Play buttons within a month. . . I’ll . . . do something. All right?”

He suggested his viewers use the hashtag, #givepewshisdiamondplaybutton to protest, and thousands have told YouTube to do the right thing, on Twitter and other social sites. 

Actually, PewDiePie is playing it for laughs, but he does have a point.  Though there are now lots of places for PewDiePie to be, he helped make YouTube legit with some advertisers, and at its Brandcast event earlier this month, it bragged about his ginormous subscriber count. So you’d think Google’s Plaques and Baubles Department could do right by him. (Though the video is not a bad way for PewDiePie to show the kind of influence he has with his fans, either. The rant is a great commercial.)

According to We The Unicorns.com, though, YouTube’s only response so far was to add a diamond emoji to his video on Twitter.--an emoji!  According to the Website, YouTube says it takes 8 to 12 weeks to create and ship a diamond play award, a hilariously serious response to a (mostly) jokey complaint.

pj@mediapost.com