Pewdiepie maintains lead over T Series in battle for YouTube crown

NEW DELHI: Swedish gamer Felix 'PewDiePie' Kjellberg has been able to maintain a comfortable lead in its online battle against Indian music brand T-Series, which is trying to dislodge the former as YouTube's the most subscribed channel.

'PewDiePie' has been able to surge ahead of the Indian label due to immense support from popular American YouTuber Mr Beast.

At the time of filing this story, the Swedish Youtuber was 135299 followers ahead of its Indian rival. 

Two days back, the subscriber count between PewDiePie and T-Series had come down to 20,000. 

As Pewds (fans of PewDiePie) fretted on how to extend the gap, Jimmy Donaldson aka MrBeast took to the Super Bowl 2019 match on February 4 and began a ‘Subscribe to PewDiePie’ campaign extending support to the Swedish YouTuber. Soon, it was breaking the Twitter and even managed to feature on sports channel ESPN.

This never-ending battle for the most subscribed YouTube channel spot between PewDiePie and T-Series has been going on for more than 10 months now.

PewDiePie, the one-man army known for his gaming commentary and controversial views, held the most subscribed channel for years now.

With the T Series fast narrowing the gap with the Swedish YouTuber, video marketing firms like Tubular Labs had predicted in advance that the Indian music brand was well "on course to surpass" PewDiePie's 83,353,773 subscribers within a short span of time.

Nonetheless, T-Series is already number one on another metric - the Most-Watched YouTube channel. 

Its videos have already garnered 60 billion views, which is three times the number of views on Justin Bieber or Katy Perry's YouTube channel. 

Analysts had earlier predicted that the Indian music brand will overtake the one-man Swedish content creator Felix Kjellberg's channel in early January 2019. But due to YouTube's cleansing of spam accounts on its platform, T Series' subscriber count came crashing drastically in December 2018. 

A household name in India since the 1980s, the company is lead by Bhushan Kumar - son of T Series founder Gulshan Kumar who was assassinated by the underworld mafia D Company in 1997. 

It has 29 TV channels in several Indian languages and hosts some of the biggest Indian artists, drawing millions of views.

At the beginning of 2018, T Series had about 30 million subscribers on its YouTube channel. With the introduction of landmark changes in Indian mobile and data service, the subscriber list sky-rocketed to over 70 million in just six months. 

The online video channel also accounts for nearly 25 percent of its sales, which is about $100 million.

PewDiePie, game commentary and comic-oriented YouTube channel, held the mantle of most subscribed for almost six years now. Despite the highest number of subscribers, PewDiePie failed to make it to YouTube Rewinds two years in a row over his controversial comments.

In January 2019, both the YouTube channels crossed the major milestone of passing 80 million-subscribers number.  

The war saw many of PewDiePie fans indulge in massive online campaigns to get more subscribers. Some even hacked worldwide printers, Google Chromecasts, smart TVs and even defaced Wall Street Journal. 

PewDiePie also saw many of his contemporaries and direct competitors, including Mr Beast, Logan Paul, Shane Dawson, come out in support.

Latest to support PewDiePie is Elon Musk - the founder of SpaceX, Tesla, Hyperloop, The Boring Company, and Neuralink. 

UK Independence Party (UKIP), A Britain-based right-wing political outfit, has also sided with  Kjellberg publicly.