Conservative YouTuber Steven Crowder is leaving the Blaze at the end of this year. Crowder announced the change last night on what was scheduled to be his last show.

The 35-year-old Canadian-American commentator is well known in conservative media for his comic spin on politics and current events. His popular “Change My Mind” segments, in which he sets up a table on college campuses and other locations to challenge passersby to talk him out of non-progressive opinions on controversial topics, have gone viral numerous times. His show has frequently been on Apple’s Top 100 podcasts chart.

“I, Mug Club, am leaving The Blaze,” said Crowder, who praised The Blaze and his colleagues at the company. “I’ve lost sleep over this for months, because I knew that I wouldn’t be renewing and of course The Blaze knew that I wouldn’t be renewing. But I have no way of reaching you.”

Crowder, who refers to his audience as the “Mug Club,” has a YouTube channel with nearly six million subscribers and he has more than one million more on Rumble.

Crowder didn’t have anything negative to say about the Blaze or about Glenn Beck but if you watch the announcement, he’s clearly very stressed out over the situation. “I had been hoping that this would be a joint statement,” he said. He went on to say that he had not been fired but didn’t describe the situation beyond that.

Reading between the lines, it sounds like all of the subscribers to his “Mug Club” were handled by the Blaze and Crowder is being told he will not be allowed to take those subscribers with him. He apparently tried to have subscribers leave their emails on a new site but that site crashed and he was concerned all of the data was lost.

Crowder wound up getting some last minute help from fellow YouTuber Jeremy at the Quartering who stayed up all night setting up a dedicated server so Crowder could try again to collect emails from his subscribers. In his own video about the announcement Jeremy said he received a call about 10:30 at night and wound up calling in a favor from another friend around midnight to get a new site set up. On his show, Crowder said that Jeremy refused to accept any money for his last minute work.

It’s not clear where Crowder is going from here. At the end of his announcement he said that he’d be sending an email to everyone in early January about where the show would be going. He did suggest he’d heard from a few interested parties already but he hadn’t made up his mind.

The comments on the story at the Daily Wire was full of subscribers urging the site to hire him, so it wouldn’t surprise me if he were to get a call from someone at DW. My guess is he’ll be just fine wherever he goes but I can understand feeling stressed out about losing contact with your entire subscriber base (over 300,000 people he said) because, apparently, the Blaze won’t turn over the info.

Here’s the full video. The announcement is just the first part of this before he goes into his regular show.