‘There are so many better options for your money’: Popular streamer turns off all donation, tells fans to give to charity

A popular Twitch and YouTube streamer has closed off all possible monetisation channels and asked his followers to either keep their money or donate it to charity.

Charles White Jr, who goes by the name Cr1TiKal, MoistCr1TiKaL on Twitch (where he has 5.7 million followers) and penguinz0 on YouTube (where he has 17.3 million), has posted a video called ‘I’m Turning it Off’ in which he urges all followers to stop giving him money.

“What I’m turning off is pretty much every way of donating to me,” White said. “I’m disabling YouTube channel memberships and super chats.”

White said he also tried to turn off monetisation for Twitch but said that once streamers opt into its partner programme they can’t turn off Bits (Twitch’s own currency) or Subscriptions.  “Bu I do think I found a solution for Bits where I set the minimum so incredibly high that I imagine nobody’s going to spend that kind of money, I hope,” he said.

“For subs, I can’t get rid of that. If I could, I would. I would say toodle-oo, give it a strong slap on the ass, tell it good game and goodbye. But from what I can tell, there’s a lot of hoops to jump through in order to accomplish that, so I’m just urging you don’t sub or anything like that on Twitch.”

White explained that the reason he was disabling all monetisation is that “I just don’t want people to donate money to me anymore”, stressing that it’s a waste of viewers’ money at a time when they should either be saving it or donating it to good causes.

“I would much rather you hold onto your money now, more than ever, with how everything’s been going,” he said. “I think it is crucial you get your finances in a fucking Full Nelson and you just don’t let those puppies fly willy-nilly, donating clams to a goofball like me.

“If you’re someone who just has all this money and it’s burning a hole in your pocket, you have to donate it. You know, [if] you have this insatiable appetite to just part ways with this money, donate it to a charitable cause instead.

“There are so many good charities doing extremely good work that could be benefited greatly from your contribution. Like, maybe you’d want to donate to a charity that’s doing extremely important work in Gaza. That would be a significantly better use of that money than donating it to me.”

White explained that while he’s told his followers for a long time that his streams can be enjoyed for free and that nobody needs to give him money numerous people have continued to do it, so he’s decided “it’s time to pull the plug on the ability to even do that”.

“I have openly discouraged it for a long time, saying that what I do is free, you don’t need to donate or anything like that, but people do still engage with it,” he explained. “And I just want to take that off of the table now.

“I feel like this is long overdue, it’s something I should have done a while ago but I had convinced myself I could deliver something of value to people that were paying. And I just don’t think there’s any value in giving money during a stream to get my attention so that way I talk about it for a second. That’s just not a good use of your money.”