PewDiePie's subscribers have gone up 700% thanks to his battle with T-Series, bucking a big YouTube trend
- PewDiePie boosted his monthly subscriber count by 700% over three months thanks to a massive campaign to stop another channel becoming the most popular YouTuber.
- Bollywood music channel T-Series keeps coming close to knocking PewDiePie off the top spot, but a sustained campaign by the Swedish YouTuber's peers and fans has kept him number one.
- PewDiePie gained more subscribers in four months in 2018 than all of 2017.
- This is particularly notable given the slowdown affecting most prominent YouTubers.
PewDiePie's campaign to keep his crown as the world's most popular YouTuber has paid off.
Since October 2018, the controversial Swede has been in danger of losing his title to an Indian company called T-Series, which posts Bollywood music videos and has amassed millions of subscribers.
PewDiePie said as much in August 2018, in a comical video challenging T-Series (a company, not a person) to a sabre fight.
In October, Tubular Labs noticed that T-Series had racked up 66 million subscribers at the time, and was growing so quickly that it would overtake PewDiePie's 67 million subscribers within a week.
It never happened, thanks to PewDiePie's campaign asking people to "smash subscribe."
This resulted in a massive groundswell of support, with PewDiePie fans sticking up posters around their cities asking people to subscribe to his channel. Perhaps more effectively, fellow YouTubers Logan Paul and Mr. Beast made videos asking their audiences to subscribe.
Check out this chart showing the massive uptick in PewDiePie's subscribers:
PewDiePie racked up more subscribers in the last four months of 2018 than in the entirety of 2017. Using statistics site SocialBlade, we worked he gain more than 13 million subscribers between September and December. It took him all of 2017 to gain 7 million subscribers.
In December alone, 6.62 million people subscribed to PewDiePie, which is a 700% acceleration in growth on his 855,000 subscriber haul in September, before the campaign to keep him ahead of T-Series began in earnest. At the time of writing, PewDiePie's total subs base stands at 80.9 million. T-Series is close with 80.5 million fans.
This is especially notable given Business Insider found in 2017 that many of the world's biggest YouTubers are seeing a massive slowdown in subscribers, including PewDiePie.
While famous YouTubers had years of massive subscriber growth, there is now more competition for views and subscribers than ever. Viewers have more choice in terms of the content they watch and the YouTubers they subscribe to, and they only have a finite amount of time.
As views and subscribers slow, YouTubers have stepped up their efforts to diversify how they make money. Think Alfie Deyes investing in startups, or KSI and Logan Paul selling tickets to their boxing matches.
PewDiePie, aka Felix Kjellberg, can thank his prominent peers for doing some of the heavy lifting on the new subscriber front.
Mr. Beast, an American YouTuber with 13 million subscribers, bought radio ads and billboards promoting PewDiePie. He also carried out a 12-hour livestreaming stunt during which he said "PewDiePie" 100,000 times. Likewise, controversial YouTuber Logan Paul offered to donate to charity if his followers subscribed to PewDiePie.
They are supporting PewDiePie on the basis he's an individual creator, rather than a company, and should remain the face of the video site.