Left-leaning journalist Kim Ou-joon, who has been a magnet of controversy for his brash words, is making top earnings as a YouTuber off its super chat donation system, the platform's website showed Thursday.

According to Playboard, which shows various statistics related to YouTube, Kim's newly launched channel gyeomsonisnothing logged 31.8 million won ($25,533) in earnings. It topped the daily chart every day from Monday to Thursday. On Monday, when the first video was uploaded, it garnered a whopping 90.7 million won in donations. As of Thursday afternoon, the channel had 966,000 subscribers.

Kim on Dec. 30, 2022 quit his post as the host of “News Factory” on TBS eFM, after a dispute about the supposed political bias of the popular radio talk show essentially stripped it of the Seoul Metropolitan Government's funding. In November, the city council passed a bill that would gut the city's funding for the radio network, after the ruling conservative People Power Party gained control of the 112-member Seoul Metropolitan Council in the June elections.

Kim's departure took a toll on the popularity of TBS, with the number of its subscribers dropping from 1.58 million on Dec. 30 to 1.44 million as of Thursday.

Super chat, introduced by YouTube in 2017, refers to a system that allows viewers to pay for a highlighted message in the chat stream. The streamer and the platform operator get paid, while the viewer gets to have his or her comment stand out.

South Korean users can spend up to 500,000 won per day on super chats. The YouTuber gets 70 percent of the profit, while the platform pockets the rest.