PewDiePie initially enrolled a YouTube account under the name "Pewdie"; he clarifies that "seat" speaks to the sound of lasers and "bite the dust" implies death. After overlooking the secret word to this record, he then enlisted the "PewDiePie" YouTube channel on 29 April 2010. After dropping out of Chalmers, his folks declined to bolster him, and subsequently PewDiePie supported his initial recordings by working at a sausage stand. On working at the stand, PewDiePie expressed, "the way that I could make recordings was quite a lot more critical to me than [that] I needed to spend a couple of hours a day doing a task that wasn't that prestigious." Five years after the fact, PewDiePie reviewed, "I knew individuals were enormous at different sorts of recordings, yet there was nobody huge in gaming, and I didn't have any acquaintance with you could profit out of it. It was never similar to a vocation that I could simply stop school to seek after. it was simply something I wanted to do. What's more, here we are five years after the fact and it's exploded. By December 2011, PewDiePie's channel had around 60,000 subscribers. Around the time his channel earned 700,000 endorsers, PewDiePie talked at Nonick Conference 2012. On 11 July 2012 the channel achieved 1 million subscribers, and it achieved 2 million supporters in September 2012. In October 2012, OpenSlate positioned the PewDiePie channel as the #1 YouTube channel. That December, PewDiePie marked with Maker Studios. 

At a very early stage in his YouTube profession, Kjellberg utilized assault jokes as a part of his recordings. Feedback of these jokes mixed debate, and in October 2012, Kjellberg posted a Tumblr message, expressing "I simply needed to clarify that I'm no more making assault jokes, as I said before I'm not hoping to hurt anybody and I apologize on the off chance that it ever did." The Globe and Mail expressed "dissimilar to numerous youthful gamers, he listened when fans and commentators alike called attention to their unsafe nature, and set out to quit making assault jokes."