According to reports by BBC News, there could be an on-going battle of who is the King of YouTube between Swedish YouTuber; Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg (a.k.a PewDiePie) and Indian music record label and film production company; T-series—founded by Gulshan Kumar.
Quoting BBC News, “Felix Kjellberg mounted a challenge to Kumar’s T-Series, to retain his status as the YouTuber with the most subscribers.”—after Bhushan Kumar came out to say he hadn’t heard of PewDiePie until a couple of months ago.
This prompted the challenge. However, Kumar told BBC India correspondent; Soutik Biswas, he’s really not bothered about this race.
“I don’t even know why PewDiePie is taking this so seriously. He’s getting his people to push him, promote him. We are not competing with him,” said Kumar.
At the time BBC published it’s article, PewDiePie and T-Series channels had 75 million subscribes. Now, as per SocialBlade—website that track statistics on social media platforms; Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, DailyMotion, and Mixer, setup a ‘LIVE’ PewDiePie vs T-Series sub count on its channel—with PewDiePie at now 79+ million subs and T-Series at 78+ million subs.
PewDiePie posts video game commentaries and vlogs on his channel while Kumar’s T-Series channel posts more about Mumbai’s entertainment; Music and Film.
According to SocialBlade, PewDiePie’s and T-Series subscribe rank come at 4th, and 5th places respectively. PewDiePie who created his channel on 29th April, 2010 has 3.7K uploads and 19,822,174,974 views while T-Series that opened on 13th March, 2006 has 13k uploads and 57,360,621,598 views. Meanwhile, on the view rank, T-Series comes in 1st place while PewDiePie comes in 8th place.
PewDiePie is currently gaining on average more than 208,409 new subscribers per day, while T-Series gets on average about 173,963 a day. On the perspective of daily average views, PewDiePie has 15,610,000 while T-Series gets 92,598,000.
Meanwhile, it’s reported that fans of PewDiePie hacked tens of thousands of printers to print out messages and posters urging people to subscribe to him. In addition, claimed to also hacked the Wall Street Journal with a note that the newspaper would be sponsoring PewDiePie in an attempt to beat T-Series in the race for subscribers.
On the other hand, Kumar said, “I have not told my artists to put up supportive messages to boost our followers on our channel. We’re not in that game.”
Gautam Anand, Managing Director of YouTube’s Asian branch, YouTube APAC, told BBC’s Soutik, “T-Series embraced the platform early, and their position today is a testament to their commitment to our platform, to their team that truly understands the medium, and to their programming strategy of delivering content that reflects the rich diversity of India and its music scene.”
Kumar completes his conversation with Soutik, saying, “We are a music label. He does something else. He’s playing games, vlogging and stuff – no comparison. I wish him all the best.”
