Felix "PewDiePie" Kjellberg may no longer have the most subscribers on YouTube. T-Series, the channel for a Bollywood production company set in India, has been quickly catching up to Pewds. In early 2017, the channel gained serious momentum, pushing over one million subscribers a month. In 2018, the channel's growth went into hyper speed, gaining anywhere from two to four million subscribers a month. Now, it's only five million subscribers away from toppling YouTube's giant, a goal it should reach by the end of the year.
Fans of both have been eagerly waiting for the moment the switch happens. A live stream countdown of both channel's numbers consistently has over 800 viewers, waiting for that pivotal moment.
Besides YouTube Music, Movies, Gaming and Sports, Pewdiepie's channel has been the most consistently successful on the platform since December of 2013. Commanding his "army of nine-year-olds," he's been able to rack up millions of views talking about YouTube drama, playing games and connecting with fans. According to SocialBlade, Pewds channel gains about half a million subscribers a month, meaning eventually T-Series will be number one.
It's no surprise why T-Series is so successful. India has a population of more than 1.3 billion people with over 225 million monthly users on YouTube. As of December 2017, India had 462 million internet users, the second highest of any country in the world. That's a huge user base always hungry for content. T-Series posts multiple videos a day, mostly action scenes or dance numbers from Bollywood movies. Some videos on the channel barely break 100,000, while other videos posted the same day can reach tens of millions of views.
Pewdiepie is still a sole creator and only uploads once a day, while T-Series has a full movie studio creating content. T-series can pull upwards of 50 billion views a day, while pewdiepie struggles to reach 20 billion.
As YouTube continues to spread worldwide, channels like T-Series will pop up more frequently. The only way for a channel to truly explode in popularity is for it to be created for a market with a hunger for content but a lack of content creators. It's one of the reasons Pewdiepie became so successful. In 2010, there were very few Let's Players who could appeal to a worldwide audience. In 2018 that's no longer the case.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Steven Asarch is a tech reporter for Newsweek currently based in New York City. In high school, he started stand-up ... Read more
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