One of my favourite YouTubers of all time is a guy named KevJumba. I used to watch a lot of his videos years ago but I drop in and out of following YouTubers so I kinda forgot to check back on him for a while.
Recently though I thought about him again and decided to go check out his YouTube page for his latest videos. To my surprise, I learned then that he stopped uploading videos 2 years ago. He has also been pretty inactive on all his social media platforms.
I was shocked. I mean here we are today reading articles about YouTubers who become millionaires in the US and KevJumba with his 3 million YouTube subscribers today was probably way up there in the ranks and would have been today if he continued.
Why did he stop? I googled around and there isn’t much material on why but I did find out that with some of the money he earned from his videos, he built a school in Kenya named after him.
From his limited postings on social media you can also see that he’s been spending time there with the kids. He talked about how he ended up starting the school in this article here.
I’m amazed.
Most people don’t know what’s the real reason why KevJumba decided to quit. Some comments online speculate that it’s because he got tired of the pressure of constantly doing videos, or tired of the fame, or that he wanted to find his true calling (helping kids in Kenya maybe) or maybe he just got bored.
I’m impressed though because not many people can walk away from what he had and almost completely disappear from social media. Heck we’ve seen people like Adele or Justin Bieber claim publicly that they’re going to quit but they never really do which begs you to wonder whether it’s all just a publicity stunt.
But the way KevJumba quit though was very subtle. There was no huge announcement, no official goodbye. Nothing attention seeking at all. His last video was this vague “Goodbye video” that most of his fans never even realised was meant to say goodbye.
This is his last video.
One day, I’d love to meet KevJumba and ask him two questions. Why he quit and how it felt. Was it difficult? Or was it perhaps liberating?
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space