Subscribe to Pewdiepie! By Nick Furnari

          To be honest, I've never been a big fan of, Swedish Youtuber, Felix Kjellberg, commonly known as Pewdiepie, but times are changing. If you didn't know, Pewdiepie is the most popular Youtuber in the world, posting original content daily, and currently reaching a subscriber count of over 68 million and climbing. However, after 5 years of being at the top of Youtube, (having over double and even triple the subscriber count of the other most famous Youtubers), he is finally about to be surpassed. Out of no where, T-Series (an Indian Bollywood music production company), started growing in subscribers. It still remained relatively unnoticed, while Pewdiepie is a house-hold name. Nevertheless, the channel took off in late 2016, and now it is at 67.9 million subscribers, currently growing at about 1 million subscribers a week! What took Pewdiepie almost 9 years, was for the most part accomplished by T-Series in the better part of 3 years. This astounding growth shocked the Youtube community, with many Youtube users just learning about T-Series now, now that they are inches away from surpassing Pewdiepie.



          How? You might be asking. How did T-Series grow so incredibly fast, without most of the Youtube community even recognizing it? This was discussed and presented to the Youtube community by many fellow famous Youtubers including Drama Alert, Mr. Beast, h3h3 Productions, and Pyrocynical. Some, like Drama Alert, had a more objective stance, and others, like Mr. Beast, voiced their opinion on the matter that T-Series was about to pass the biggest Youtuber there ever was. In almost all of these videos explaining the situation, it has been stated that the reason for T-Series' immense growth was due to its location. India, with a population of 1.3 billion, is far greater than the American population of 325 million. On the other hand, Most of Europe is a main stage for Pewdiepie as well, (having being Swedish himself), but even the population of all of Europe is only 741 million. Using these population statistics, it is easy to figure that T-Series would be growing subscribers at a faster rate. It is also rumored that T-Series purchases fake subscribers just to add to their total subscriber count.




          Regardless of his fame, Pewdiepie has always been a controversial Youtuber, having made some mistakes in the past, and many people just don't understand his wild sense of humor. However, that doesn't retract the fact that he posts original content every day, always tryng to make us laugh. This effort does not go unnoticed in the Youtube community and many people think he still deserves to be the most subscribed Youtube channel. T-Series however, pumps out content several times a day, but it is important to remember that quality is better than quantity. Although T-Series releases new videos faster than any other channel on Youtube, they are mostly 3 minute music videos that are poorly directed, and poorly acted, while Pewdiepie releases original 10 to 20 minute videos for our entertainment.



          Fearing that Pewdiepie will soon fall to second place against a cheesy and unoriginal channel, Youtubers decided to band together and try to keep Pewdiepie on top. Mr. Beast, an increasingly popular Youtube channel with about 10 million subscribers, probably made the biggest contribution thus far to sustaining the first place title of Pewdiepie. He posted a video 4 days ago titled, "I Bought Every Billboard In My City For This" In which he buys adds on websites, in stores, and on billboards, and he goes to radio and TV shows to tell everyone to subscribe to Pewdiepie. He explains how Pewdiepie makes every video original and worth watching, and saying how it would be a shame if he got passed by T-Series. Overall, this remains a huge topic across Youtube, with major support for Pewdiepie being expressed through social media. As a result of the massive promotions for Pewdiepie by Mr. Beast, and other Youtubers, Pewdiepie is starting to grow just as fast if not faster than T-Series, and for now is just able to remain the most subscribed Youtuber in the world. There is a live subscriber count that was started on September 1 by Youtuber, FlareTV that represents the current total growth of both Youtube channels to see the percent change, and rate of growth, to judge how much longer Pewdiepie can hold out against T-Series.