Entertainment

YouTube’s PewDiePie and T-Series battle to break the internet

Mesmerizing is watching the race between the Swedish YouTuber Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, known as PewDiePie, and the Bollywood content creator, T-Series, for the most subscribers on YouTube. The stakes are high for both of the contenders, but higher for PewDiePie, who, despite garnering over 73.5 million subscribers, faces what looks to be an inevitable dethronement as the most-subscribed-to-YouTube-content-creator.

On the YouTube channel for Social Blade, an internet analytics company, there is a live stream of the count showing him slightly ahead of T-Series, which has over 73.2 million subscribers, both of them gaining subscribers at a steady clip. The implication of this contest, which will conclude anytime between December 14th and January 1st, is more than just bragging rights. For T-Series to surpass PewDiePie in subscribers would indicate a seismic shift of internet influence being concentrated in the U.S. and Europe.

According to a demographic report published by YouTube, 80 percent of its users already come from outside of the U.S. And as the internet penetration rate (IGR) increases in developing countries, this gap of non-U.S. or European users will only widen. When T-Series was founded over 35 years ago by Gulshan Kumar, the population of India was 731 million people. Now, with over 1.3 billion people, India boasts nearly 18 percent of the world’s population, and T-Series is the largest recordin the country.

Scroll down the T-Series channel and you’ll find over twelve thousand uploads of highly produced movie clips and music videos that you likely have never heard of if you aren’t familiar with Bollywood culture. The most viewed video on the channel, “LAHORE,” has 625 millions views and is a music video produced by Bhushan Kumar, the chairman of T-Series and the younger brother of T-Series founder.

Tragically, the older brother never got to see the rampant success of his own creation—he was murdered in 1997 by a Mumbai mafia syndicate called D-Company. It took thirteen years after his death for the company, under the leadership of Bhushan, to start uploading content to YouTube, and since then, it has matched India’s rampant growth as an internet power house.

But if there were a match for nearly 18 percent of the world’s population, it would be the 29-year-old PewDiePie, who has maintained the largest subscribed-to channel for five years. As soon as his title was challenged in early September, he leveraged his most coveted asset—influence—in the form of 20 year-old American vlogger Jimmy “Mr Beast” Donaldson. Donaldson, known as YouTube’s biggest philanthropist, has over 11.4 million subscribers and a grand total of 1.3 billion views.

Despite the match-up, it is worth noting that PewDiePie is a solo creator and T-Series a full-fledged company, a representative from Social Blade told The Sociable over the phone. Nevertheless, the competition is stiff and at times reminiscent of a political campaign—lover of controversy and publicity and PewDiePie, Mr. Beast spent over a $1 million on billboard advertisements for PewDiePie, one taking up real estate in Times Square-–and other times, a boxing match—PewDiePie created a diss-track called “B*tch Lasgana” that has over 50 million views. T-Series, on the other hand, has simply “done what it has always done,” which is upload music video content that its audience is interested in.

Jordan Jones

Jordan T. Jones is a writer and social media editor who lives in Medellin, Colombia. He is interested in the diverse ways that society creates and responds to culture. The Atlanta-native is a Fulbright scholar, former associate editor at The Atlantic, and amateur salsa dancer.

Recent Posts

Financial resilience weakens in SMBs, putting need for robust reporting techniques in the spotlight 

The month-end close process refers to a set of accounting processes to review, record and…

1 hour ago

RAND wargames to see if AI could wipe out humanity with pathogens, geoengineering & nukes

The RAND Corporation wargames scenarios to see if AI could contribute to human extinction by…

2 days ago

Prezent marks another major milestone as Dr. Charlotte Owens appointed to newly announced Senior Executive Board

Since GenAI hit the public market, it’s been a natural fit for a range of…

2 days ago

AI Isn’t a Religion (Yet): Why Tech’s False Prophets Aren’t the Problem

Correct me if I’m wrong, but one of the unofficial slogans of Trump’s second administration…

3 days ago

10 Independent Writers Leading the Design Conversation in 2025

While major design houses and celebrities often steal the spotlight, it’s the independent voices behind…

7 days ago

Building trust across clouds: Expert insight on how AI cloud-native MFT platforms are empowering businesses (Brains Byte Back Podcast)

For modern, data-driven organizations, managing data effectively is an ongoing challenge.  (more…)

1 week ago