PewDiePie Not the Only YouTuber Being Cut by Disney

Disney's Maker Studios made headlines this week by cancelling its support of YouTube star PewDiePie after the online celebrity posted anti-semitic videos. But PewDiePie isn't going to be the last YouTuber to be axed as the corporate mothership streamlines its small-producer stable.

Disney bought Maker Studios, a conglomeration of popular YouTube channels, in 2014 for $500 million. The deal allowed for total compensation of up to $950 million if the company met financial targets. It didn't, and the final price tag was closer to $675 million.

The missed targets were possibly the first sign for Disney that the Maker deal might not be as lucrative as it at first looked. Some of the Maker's top executives have left since the Disney acquisition, and the company has experienced previous rounds of layoffs.

Of the hundreds (perhaps thousands) of Maker channels, PewDiePie's was the one with the largest subscriber base and was presumably the most profitable for Maker's corporate parent. Now reports say that Disney intends to trim away many of the company's smaller channels to focus on about 300 hundred of the biggest earners.

That means that Maker's staff is likely to undergo significant cuts, and hundreds (or thousands) of second-tier content creators are going to find themselves without support from Maker.