Congratulations everybody. You've all subscribed to PewDiePie and he has hit 100 million YouTube subscribers. And this is exactly when he finally did it.

Now, I've got to be honest with you. I didn't think we were going to be able to capture this landmark event because YouTube are supposed to abbreviate all subscriber counts over a thousand. Att the time of the announcement, PewDiePie's subscriber count was slugging along in the mid-ninety millions, and it didn't look as if he would hit 100 million until the end of the year.

That is, until he started playing Minecraft. Almost over night, PewDiePie doubled both his daily view, and daily sub count. He has now pumped half a billion views into the revitalized Minecraft topic on YouTube, which is currently more popular than Fortnite. That particular story deserves a video in it's own right, which we've already done, and you can watch it here.

But the good news is, for real-time subscriber counts, PewDiePie has made it before abbreviations have kicked in. All of which brings us back to the early hours of Sunday, August the 25th 2019. The day PewDiePie reached 100 million YouTube subscribers.

Let's slow things down to real time, and watch the very moment PewDiePie hit 100 million subscribers. Yep, you saw that right? A jump of 70 subscribers in a single second. No doubt caused by thousands of people clicking the subscribe button at exactly the same time, to try and be the 100 millionth PewDiePie subscriber. Though how anyone is ever going to prove that, is beyond me. Anyway, that is your official date and time recorded in history for all to see. But of course, no subscriber count ever stays static for long. Now, the actual relationship between PewDiePie and YouTube has been somewhat strained over the past couple of years, due to controversies on PewDiePie's channel. But credit where credit is due for YouTube, who tweeted out this 

More good news for you PewDiePie fans. While T-Series may have been the first YouTube channel to 100 million subscribers, PewDiePie is the fastest channel to 100 million subscribers. PewDiePie, Felix, 100 million congratulations on your success, on what must be the single greatest week of your entire life. You directly, or indirectly, have influenced a generation. Tens of millions of video creators, to pick up their camera, and share their message on YouTube. And this, in the last decade, has impacted the world in a way we've never seen before. You have led the way to this, so that we all know it's possible.

If you want to take your YouTube channel to the next level and 

 then make sure to download vidIQ. It will help you research YouTube, analyze videos, audit your own channel, and take actionable steps 

PewDiePie just smashed through the 100 million mark to become the most-subscribed-to individual creator on YouTube ever! Read about the moment it happened.

PewDiePie: The Moment He Hit 100,000,000 YouTube Subscribers

If you are new to vidIQ then you are in for a visual treat in the above video because this is the countdown between T-Series and the only channel left standing in their way to being the most subscribed to channel on YouTube. That channel is YouTube Music which isn't really a channel in the traditional sense since it has no videos of its own and was automatically generated by YouTube's video discovery system.

But since T-Series overtook PewDiePie back in April, YouTube Music has been the excuse many have been using to say T-Series isn't the largest YouTube channel. But with a subscriber count of 14,000 subscribers per day versus 104,000 subscribers per day, it was only a matter of time before T-Series put this argument to bed as well. Now for some interesting nuggets of data:

1. The T-Series channel was created on March 13th, 2006, therefore taking T-Series 13 years, four months, 22 days or 4,892 days or 117,408 hours to become the most subscribed to channel on YouTube.

2. If we do a little rounding of the numbers that equates to 22,000 subscribers per day over the course of the channel's life.

3. But of course the numbers are never quite as smooth as that. T-Series started on 78 million subscribers in 2019 and have gained over 29 million subscribers this year already. Basically a third of their entire channel size.

4. And since we've just started week 32 of 2019 that basically works out at almost a million subscribers per week.

5. Now this number will be out of date almost the second I record it, but at the time of takeover T-Series had 13,684 videos on their channel. That works out at roughly 7,845 subscribers per video.

But with all that being said it is game time. Here we are Sunday, August 4th, in all the important time zones, which ties a neat little bow around this event. So let's slow things down to real-time so we can record and document the exact moment T-Series became the most subscribed to channel on YouTube. Now that's pretty cool, we managed to capture the exact moment the two channels were neck and neck. And let's restart it again. And there we have it folks. The date and time T-Series took the crown of both the most watched and most subscribed to channel on YouTube. Because, just in case you didn't know, T-Series also have over 78 billion video views.

And as we have always said throughout these explorations into the data behind the biggest channels on YouTube we take no sides. This is a celebration of the video platform that has revolutionized the way the globe communicates. And the power it has given to almost any person in the world to reach almost every person in the world. Whether that be the largest music label in Asia, or indeed a solo Swedish gamer. (exploding Yep, don't worry, don't worry, we haven't forgotten about him. We're just wondering if he's gonna make it to 100 million subscribers in time before YouTube switch off these real-time subscriber counts.

It is now finally official and undisputed. T Series is the most subscribed to channel on YouTube and this is exactly when they finally did it.

T Series is Now the Most Subscribed To YouTube Channel Ever

Is this going to be another video about when PewDiePie reaches 100,000,000 subscribers? It's not, no. But he is getting close, and I'd thought I'd dust off the old cobwebs on this thing and get it up and running again. But what is interesting is the speed at which these subscribers are coming in to PewDiePie channel once again.

It's almost like that thing we were talking about for the first six months of the year. Just so happens we've got a cool VidIQ tool to show you what we mean. These are the weekly subscriber counts for PewDiePie's channel since he started the year, and during that 

 they were off the charts, pretty much a million subs per week.

Then PewDiePie himself asked the community to end the subscriber meme as he called it. T-Series overtook PewDiePie and he went back to his regular subscriber numbers. But in the last month, those subscriber number have risen once again. Going from around abut 25,000 subscribers a day to around 45,000 subscribers per day. But this time we're not just looking at subscribers, we're looking at something that's far more valuable to the video creator themselves. And that is views.

Our tool can show you that as well, the weekly number of views on PewDiePie's channel this year so far. And there is no consistency here, with the only spike representing PewDiePie's 

, which went viral. What's far more fascinating here, is the last month worth of views, that have accumulated into more than anything PewDiePie was getting during that great subscriber battle. Now, this sort of evidence leads me to two conclusions. Firstly, during the subscriber battle between T-Series and PewDiePie, people were just creating YouTube accounts and subscribing to PewDiePie, without watching any of his content. Almost as if they were sub-bots. Did I just say that out loud? And secondly, PewDiePie has more or less tripled his daily view count in a space of just two months. And that's what's got our attention. How can a YouTube channel that's already one of the biggest in the world, effectively double it's view count seemingly overnight.

PewDiePie & Minecraft: Generating New Wave of Subscribers

Yes, ladies and gentleman, boys and girls, children of all ages, especially nine year olds, PewDiePie has returned to his roots - the game that kick started his YouTube career. Minecraft. And this blast into the past has already proven to be very lucrative.

As we can see using another VidIQ tool. It shows the view performance of the PewDiePie video below verses the channel average. And after one day, the video performed worse than the average PewDiePie video. But it didn't take long to reverse that trend. By day seven it was performing above expectation, and after a month it was almost double what PewDiePie would usually expect from one of his videos on his channel.

And when you think about it, that makes total sense. Remember millions, potentially tens of millions of people subscribed to PewDiePie's channel for that original Minecraft content. And do you know what a lot of people still do on YouTube a decade later? They search for Minecraft. And who is at the top of that search term right now? Yeah, that's right. It's PewDiePie. And according to our VidIQ research tool, he is the top creator for the keyword right now. Meaning he has the most videos on the first page of Minecraft search for YouTube.

Now, PewDiePie isn't usually one to strategically go after keywords, or try to rank videos for certain topics. And that's not because he doesn't know how to, he just doesn't care and doesn't have to. These are the videos PewDiePie was making a month ago. Which are, well, whatever PewDiePie wants to make. And those videos range from anywhere between 4,000,000 views to 9,000,000 views. Yeah, exactly. Who cares about strategy when you're that successful with every single video that you make?

But, for the last month, PewDiePie has made nothing but Minecraft videos. And every single one of them is getting more than 10,000,000 views. Essentially PewDiePie has embraced the most basic principal in the YouTube playbook. Focus on a topic, and deliver that to your audience with every single video that you make. The double down concept. But again, I don't think PewDiePie is actively pursuing this strategy because he wants more subscribers, or more viewers, or indeed more money from the ad sales on the videos. I think he's just playing Minecraft because he wants to play Minecraft again.

Now in the last month, PewDiePie has made around about 25 videos on the topic of Minecraft. Each of them getting at least 10,000,000 views. So lets put that into perspective. At least 250,000,000 views being plowed into a topic. That has had quite a ripple effect on Minecraft as a search term.

Back to our VidIQ tools once again, where we can see what video tags creators are using. And in a very rare occurrence, for PewDiePie's return to Minecraft gaming, he actually used some tags. One of those tags was Minecraft, and when we click it, our keyword inspector is launched, showing you the trend of that keyword over time. And, right now, Minecraft is trending more than it ever has done, in the last 365 days.

The pivot point for this surge in popularity, was the second half of June. Any guesses for when PewDiePie's first Minecraft video was? Yeah, I'm afraid there's no prizes for this. I've told told you in the first 10 seconds of this video. It's the 21st of June. This is not a coincidence. This will also explain why some of your favorite YouTubers have suddenly returned to Minecraft, or started dabbling in it, jumping on the wave of a returning trend in this case. And I'm not going to lie to you, folks, that's exactly what we are doing right now. Jumping on a trend.

I think it's fair to say PewDiePie has had a very positive impact on the popularity of Minecraft this summer. And what makes all of this even more interesting, is the demise of YouTube's other great gaming institution. Fortnite. For the first time in 18 months, more people are searching for Minecraft than they are for Fortnite. And we're not just talking about search volume here. Fortnite has been in decline in terms of revenue and hours watched on streaming platforms, such as Twitch.

Now in the grand scheme of the gaming universe, this isn't too much of a surprise to me. Games have a limited lifecycle. And, for Fortnite to be at the top of the gaming universe for the last 18 months, two years, is testament to how well that game has done. After all, it did pretty much define the Battle Royale genre, and there are lots of competitors who want to muscle in on that piece of the pie. But when it comes to Minecraft, it has durability on a whole different level. It didn't just define it's genre, it created it in the first place, and is accessible to all ages.

Admittedly, this is a tiny sample size, but when PewDiePie jumped back into the Minecraft topic, he also did a Fortnite collaboration video with Jacksepticeye, a gaming channel with more than 22,000,000 subscribers. The Minecraft video you see next to it got nearly 8,000,000 more views. When two of YouTube's most prominent video creators with a combined subscriber base of more than 120,000,000 subscribers put together a video on Fortnite which performs three times worse than a video on Minecraft, then you know Fortnite's in a bit of trouble.

But terminal? Well, Minecraft has gone through similar trend recessions, and has been declining overall for years. But it still has a warm place in gamers hearts. None more so than PewDiePie's. As for when he hits 1000,000,000 subscribers, well if does carry on creating Minecraft videos, I'm going for August the 12th. What do you think?

PewDiePie has returned to making Minecraft videos on YouTube, and it’s having a dramatic effect on his channel as he nears the 100 million subscriber mark.

PewDiePie Nears 100M YouTube Subscribers with Minecraft Push

Life as YouTube's largest solo video creator has been a rollercoaster for PewDiePie. Overall interest in his channel has waned, with the exception of occasional controversies, but we all know why this apparent decline has happened. It's because the passion shown towards his race to be the 

most subscribed to channel on YouTube against T-Series

 has dwarfed all the other things PewDiePie's done in the past.

We all knew this story would come to an end and it abruptly did when PewDiePie asked his audience to stop the 'Subscribe to PewDiePie' meme. But what effect did that have for PewDiePie? Yup, interest fell through the floor. T-Series became the subscriber king and we all moved on.

, he did go into a tiny bit of detail about his analytics but we thought we'd take a closer look because, in reality, is PewDiePie better off today than he was a year ago?

Let's start off with this golden nugget of data. PewDiePie's video about his analytics, is, after seven days with seven million views, already performing better than his average video, which is expected to get six and a half million views after 28 days.

Oh, how did he get that data, Rob, I hear you ask? And what on earth is this tool? I want it. I'm glad you asked because it's now time for the VidIQ shameless plug claxon. In the new YouTube Creator Studio, if you view one of your videos, YouTube will display the expected high and low end of views your average video is expected to get. It's good for seeing if a particular video's done well for your channel. But we decided to take that concept a monumental leap forward with our 

 which tracks the performance of any video on YouTube during its first 28 days and compares it to the video's channel average, your channel average, or any channel on YouTube's average.

With this tool, we can see how an average video performs on PewDiePie's channel. And since he posts every single day, we've got plenty of videos to look at. What you will find is that PewDiePie is remarkably consistent with one or two exceptions, every video gets between five and 10 million views.

Occasionally, a video may over perform its average, but very, very rarely will you find a dud on the channel. But obviously, it leads to a question that all video creators get asked. PewDiePie has nearly 97 million subscribers and yet, each video only gets between five and six and a half million views. That's less than 10% of his potential subscribers watching his content and not all of those views would be subscribers.

What would help, at this point, is if we could compare PewDiePie's video view velocity against another channel's stats. Let’s pick T series! That channel seems to have much more unpredictable results with views after 28 days, averaging between 475,000 and 900,000 views. T-Series may be the most subscribed to independent channel on YouTube (and by independent, I mean independent from YouTube, so not YouTube Music).

But, on average, less than 1% of T Series’ channel subscribers will watch each video. Now of course, this is offset by the fact that T-Series publish several videos a day and some of their videos get hundreds of millions of views, which helps boost the numbers. But what you can argue here is that PewDiePie has a loyal, consistent audience because they know what to expect from every single video. In contrast, T-Series, by nature of its eclectic music and movie content, is very much a pick and choose what you fancy type of channel.

Now I'm not going to argue about which is the better type of channel to have, it just represents different generations of the YouTube platform. On the one hand, you have the individual video content creator, the personality versus the big movie label, big content, lots to see brand channel.

Mr Beast: Twice as Many Average Video Views than T Series or PewDiePie

But what about the channel that achieves both? Lots of subscribers and an amazing number of views for the size of a channel - we've got just the example. Each video on Mr Beast’s YouTube channel averages, and let me just say that again, averages 13 to 16 and a half million views. But the incredible thing is that this channel is just, and I'll say this again in relative terms, just 21 million subscribers. It has a quarter of the subscribers of either PewDiePie or T-Series, yet averages at least twice as many views per video.

If we dive into a bit of a detail. Each video on Mr. Beast's channel seems to actually increase in velocity after 24 hours, almost as if millions of subscribers get notifications, flood the video with views, which sends positive signals to YouTube, who, in turn, share the video out to an even wider audience.

In contrast, PewDiePie's videos follow the much more traditional route of sharp initial velocity before tailing off after three and seven days. And when you look at the channels side by side, look at how even after seven days, Mr. Beast videos still have upward velocity and momentum, whereas PewDiePie and T-Series average videos completely flatten out, like many videos do on YouTube. That's a sign of YouTube continuing to push all of Mr. Beast's videos on browse pages and suggested videos, long after the videos have gone live.

So, is PewDiePie any worse off today than he was a year ago? Well, the stats do speak for themselves. In May 2018, PewDiePie's channel got 218 million views. In May 2019, PewDiePie's channel got 334 million views, an increase of 53%. PewDiePie, I think you're doing just fine. As are T-Series, who are getting along just fine, but you know what? Mr. Beast might be doing just a little bit better.

If you want to take your YouTube channel to the next level then make sure to download vidIQ. It will help you research YouTube, analyze videos, audit your own channel, and take actionable steps 

PewDiePie thinks his YouTube channel might be dying. Let's investigate by comparing his average video view count against T Series and Mr Beast.

PewDiePie's YouTube Analytics (Featuring T Series and Mr Beast)

Congratulations to T Series, the first independent YouTube channel to reach 100,000,000 subscribers. I made a prediction about a month ago that T-Series would surpass 100M subscribers on the 23rd of May 2019 - and I was only out by a week! I blame Pewdiepie to be honest, since the end of the subscriber race, T Series' own subscriber pace has slowed by about 20,000 subscribers a day.

They still average 120,000 subscribers a day, but you tell me who isn't gonna miss an extra 140,000 subscribers a week? 20,000? 140,000? 100,000,000? Isn't it amazing how much we take these figures for granted these days? And that's whats fascinated me more than anything else throughout this story.

The internet didn't exist 30 years ago. YouTube didn't exist a decade and a half ago. And yet, there is the ability to share something for free and have it influence more than 100,000,000 people. If you can think of a better example of the transformation of global communications, let me know.

T Series are the first independent channel, 

, to hit 100,000,000 subscribers, and I think it's only fair to award T Series our milestone achievement award. Congratulations! And T-Series aren't shy about celebrating their success either. This is what their channel banner currently looks like:

But ultimately, 100,000,000 is just another number on the continuous and unrelenting march towards more subscribers. I've got a few final numbers to share with you here. T-Series joined YouTube on Monday, March 13th 2006. That means it took them 4,784 days or 13 years, one month, and six days to go from zero to 100,000,000 subscribers. If you average that over the lifetime of the entire channel, that's 20,890 subscribers per day.

But that only tells you a tiny portion of the story because on this day last year, T-Series had 46.75 million subscribers. Yeah, that's right. The largest channel in the world more than doubled its size in just 365 days. And that more or less, brings us to the end of this numerical adventure, because YouTube wants to 

Want To Get More YouTube Views & Subscribers?

T Series just became the first independent YouTube channel to hit 100M subscribers! The entertainment channel more than doubled its number of subscribers in just one year.

T Series: The Moment They Hit 100 Million YouTube Subscribers

 T-Series is now two million subscribers ahead of PewDiePie, and are well on the way to 100 million subscribers. As of time of this recording, they collectively have 193 million subscribers. Which puts them population wise, almost on the par with the African country of Nigeria. The trouble with these stats is that they go out of date very, very quickly. So if we were to look back on the PewDiePie vs. T-Series subscribers ranks. Where would we start and where would we finish? Let’s take a look.

 It’s only fair to use FlareTV as a starting point. Their 24/7 streamer live sub count was the first and is still running today. They first started their stream, way back on the first of September 2018. As for when the race finished. Well you could either pick the last date, PewDiePie was in the lead or, the date on which he officially ended the campaign with his video. Which was on April 28th and that's the one we're going to go with. And how many days are there between the, first of September 2018 and the 28th of April 2019? I'm glad you asked - its 239. And when you have some fixed dates to use as reference points, you can start to have fun with the data.

 For example on September the first 2018, PewDiePie has 65.76 million subscribers. 239 days later, he had 95.05 million subscribers. An increase of 29.29 million subscribers.

 As for T-Series, back on 1st of September, they still had some chasing to do as they were on 60.07 million subscribers. But by the end they were on, 96.27 million subscribers, which was an increase of 36.13 million subscribers. In those 239 days.

 And if you have a set number of days, then you know we total the number of subscribers gained in that time. What you can work out next, is the average number of subscribers per day. PewDiePie gained 123K subscribers per day. T-Series 147K subscribers per day. Whatever way you look at it, the numbers are already astronomical. And we haven't even started yet. Because you see, everybody's been focused on the subscriber rate between PewDiePie and T-Series. But what do all of the subscribers do? They click on videos and watch them. So what about the views.

 Well forget the millions, now the numbers are moving into the billions. PewDiePie's channel started this race on 18.64 billion views and by the of it he had 21.27 billion views. An increase of 2.63 billion views. That's the equivalent of one in every three people on the entire planet watching one of PewDiePie's videos.

 And if you thought that was impressive, you haven’t seen anything yet. T-Series already had 46.89 billion views, before this race started. And now they have 68.92 billion views - an increase of 22.03 billion views. That's more views than PewDiePie's entire channel, in 239 days.

 When you boil down those numbers into averages, PewDiePie's channel earned 11 million views a day. While T-Series brought in an astronomical 92.2 million views a day. Now if my maths are right, that works out at 3.8M views an hour or 1056 views per second.

 Let’s take a look at the record-breaking days. PewDiePie's best subscriber day of the whole race, was December 1st 2018, when he gained 544 thousand subscribers. His best viewing day was on April 1st, when the channel brought 25 million views and 308K subscribers.

 For T-Series, well their best day was also December 1st 2018 with 326K subscribers. They're best viewing day was April 18th with 122 million views, and 176 thousand subscribers.

 As for record-breaking videos, we can't avoid PewDiePie's, two diss-tracks on the subscriber race. Which to date, have collectively brought in, over 200 million views. These two videos are now PewDiePie's, most popular videos on his entire channel.

 As you might expect, T-Series never directly address the subscriber race with a song. Their most popular video during the race, was 

 with over half a billion views. But it is by no means the popular video on their entire channel.

 2017 days - the combined total of time, PewDiePie has spent as the most subscribed channel on YouTube.

 April the 14th 2019 - the day T-Series, took the crown and, they have remained there ever since.

 Since we know the total number of days, that gives us the total number of subscribers and views for both channels during this race. What conversion rate does that give us for, views per subscribers? Or what I like to call VPS. PewDiePie gained a new subscriber for every 89. 7 views. While it took T-Series, 654.2 views for every subscriber they earned.

It’s been quite a rollercoaster race on YouTube between PewDiePie and T Series over the past few months. Let’s take a look at 15 numbers that defined the story.

PewDiePie Vs T Series: 15 Numbers That Tell The Story

First of all, let's congratulate T Series, the first non-YouTube aggregated channel to surpass 95 million subscribers. That's quite a feat, and PewDiePie should achieve the same milestone soon, which is even more remarkable, for an individual video creator.

Second of all, that subscriber gap got big in a hurry, didn't it? In the short space of just seven days, T Series increased its lead by more than half a million subscribers. Seven days versus seven months of back and forth puts things into a little perspective, doesn't it? And we're now into a phase of the game where PewDiePie never really catches back up irrespective of the world clock. Day or night, T Series is storming ahead. At this rate, by the end of this week, T Series will be more than a million subscribers ahead of PewDiePie in this race, and at that point, do we even call it a race anymore?

So, what happened over the last week? Well, as we mentioned, on April the 19th, T Series launched their music collaboration with western rapper Pitbull, and in five days, it's amassed more than 66 million views.

The video gets a perfect vidIQ video score, a perfect vidIQ SEO score, most of the tags rank number one, and the video was running at over one million views per hour for a solid 12 hours. The data that vidIQ is collecting here (

which it does for every single video on YouTube

), presents the average data analyst with some remarkable numbers. But when it comes to T Series, they operate on an entirely different level to PewDiePie, where single videos, or single campaigns, can drive many subscribers.

With T Series, it's just sheer weight of numbers from the entire channel. Since the release of the Pitbull video on T Series, which brought in 63 million views, the entire channel has generated 534 million views, along with nearly 800,000 subscribers, and those are only the numbers when I recorded this video. By the time you read this, they'll be even higher.

Is PewDiePie Suffering From YouTube Subscriber Fatigue?

Another factor that seems to be weighing against PewDiePie right now is subscriber fatigue. The last time PewDiePie's channel got more than 100,000 subscribers in a single day was April the 8th. As for T Series, well, I had to do little bit of digging here and, with the exception of a massive subscriber purge in the middle of December, the last time T Series got less than 100,000 subscribers in a single day on their channel, was the beginning of October 2018. That just shows you the difference between the numbers and the channels.

However, ‘International PewDiePie Day’, which marks the YouTube channel's ninth anniversary on April the 29th, could be the catalyst for something extraordinary. And, of course, there is still the YouTube community at large, making videos and starting campaigns to get their audience to subscribe to PewDiePie, whether PewDiePie wants that help or not.

By this time next week, we'll know a number of things. First of all, we'll know whether or not International PewDiePie Day had any effect on the subscriber race. We'll know whether or not T Series is more than a million subscribers ahead of PewDiePie.

As T Series becomes the first non-YouTube aggregated channel to generate 95M subscribers, its lead over PewDiePie stands at over 840K. Is the race for the most-subscribed to YouTube channel finally over?

PewDiePie vs T Series...Is the Race for the YouTube Crown Finally Over?

On April 1st PewDiePie retook the lead for the most subscribed to Channel, in the 

' diss track which now has over 80 million views. PewDiePie went a few hundred thousand subscribers ahead, and then T Series slowly clawed that back. But that difference accelerated when T Series were about 50,000 subscribers behind, and then 24 hours later, they got to 80,000 subscribers ahead. A pretty significant difference, especially in T Series' favor. And what can we credit this sudden influx of subscribers to? Put simply, it's YouTube views.

Anything PewDiePie can do in terms of generating views, T Series can do more frequently and with a lot more resources. And although 

T Series is absolutely terrible at converting views into subscribers

, ultimately for this subscriber race that doesn't matter.

And now things have turned legal, PewDiePie's diss tracks have irritated T Series enough for the case to go to court. With those videos no longer viewable in India. Is this just the start of potential legal wranglings between the two? Now of course, as we all know you write off PewDiePie in the subscriber race at your peril. But for six months he was the one being chased and now the roles have reversed, the pendulum has swung. PewDiePie has to chase T Series down to 100 million subscribers. Everything seems to be flowing in one direction. But you know who we haven't heard from for a while? PewDiePie himself - don’t write him off.

While the title for the most subscribed to YouTube Channel flip flops between the two, we ask - how much longer can PewDiePie actually hold T Series off for good?

PewDiePie vs T Series- How Much Longer Can PewDiePie Hold T Series Off For Good?

PewDiePie has the lead over T Series, once again, in the subscriber race and indeed the chase to 100,000,000 subscribers. The combined subscriber count is approaching 190M and of course, there's absolutely no duplication in numbers here, because there's no crossover between PewDiePie's audience and T Series' audience. Nobody's going to subscribe to both channels, are they? Or, they are and then, they're going to unsubscribe from one channel to bring the numbers down. You can see the issue here.

Now, of course PewDiePie and T Series subscriber sources are private. We're not going to have access to that, but we can investigate where subscribers typically come from for a channel and then you can decide where you think both PewDiePie and T Series' subscribers are generally coming from.

PewDiePie & T Series: Where are Subscribers Coming From?

We're going to be using VidIQ as a reference point to find out all of the different subscriber sources there are and you can do that by going to analytics, clicking the "see more" link on any of the channel-wide graphs, and then selecting subscriber source. If you have your own channel, it might be worth doing this right now to follow along.

Now, where else could we start but with the YouTube watch page? This is when a viewer found the content so valuable that they were compelled to click the "subscribe" button as they were watching the video. PewDiePie's "

" dis-track has amassed 65M views in a week, which has helped him bring in over 1,500,000 subscribers in that time.

Now, not all of those subscribers are coming from one video. PewDiePie produces daily content, after all. But in the previous week, he got 950,000 subscribers. Logic dictates that valuable videos that connects with your audience will bring in more subscribers and it always helps when the video goes viral, even if YouTube never puts it on the "trending page."

Just to make sure we're fair and balanced on this - if we look at this purely from a views versus subscriber perspective, things do get really interesting. Last June, before the subscriber rates really got going, T Series got eight times as many views, but only five times as many subscribers as PewDiePie. If we fast forward to December, when the race was in full effect, PewDiePie doubles his view count, while T Series increased theirs by around 40%.

But when it comes to subscribers, PewDiePie has increased his count by almost 800%. T Series on the other hand, have increased their sub-count 50%. More or less, in line with their increased view count. I think all of this tells us something really interesting on both sides.

PewDiePie & T Series: Views vs Subscribers

First of all, T Series is terrible at converting views into subscribers and that is due to the nature of their very diverse content. You've got all sorts of music genres on one channel and if you've looked at T Series, their views spike depending on what type of video is being pushed out on their channel. As for PewDiePie, 200% increase in views, 800% increase in subscribers. Time for an eyebrow raise. Of course, we kind of have an explanation for that. It's all of these other YouTubers, such as Mr. Beast and Markiplier rallying behind PewDiePie, but just because he gets some subscribers, it doesn't mean he actually gets more viewers from it and build an engaged audience with his channel. In most cases, a channel will get most of its subscribers from the video watch pages.

On the other hand, there are a bundle of subscriber sources that generate virtually no subscribers. Those being, the "subscribe" button on your channel page, subscriptions from the search results based on queries, interactive cards and end screens within videos, and so on. But two subscribe sources that do deserve more scrutiny however, are ‘other’ and ‘other YouTube channel’.

What does ‘other’ refer to? T Series, being a massive Bollywood film and music label, has external ways to encourage people to subscribe to their channel. One such place being their official website. ‘Other YouTube Channel’ is another potential fountain of subscribers too. Again, T Series has the opportunity to combine the might of all of it's YouTube channels to create a network of subscriber opportunities and they do. We took a deeper look into this and it also seems that individual videos from other channels can push subscribers to you too.

Not quite sure how that differs to watch page subscriptions, but if we look at it from this point of view, the T Series channel pushes out three to four videos a day, that's in comparison to PewDiePie, who averages a single video a day. That means, more opportunities for T Series to get videos suggested on other videos and more potential subscribers from that other YouTube channel source.

How YouTube Channels Also Lose Subscribers

Now so far, we've only talked about how each channel can gain subscribers, but don't forget, you can also lose subscribers as well. You can of course, gain and lose subscribers from all sources, but there are only a few that generate negative numbers and of particular interest in the PewDiePie versus T Series race, closed accounts is likely the one that's abnormally high.

If you're familiar with the subscriber race, you'll have seen those moments where either PewDiePie or T Series gain or lose tens of thousands of subscribers in a single second, which is impossible, unless there is a subscriber purge or audit. YouTube do talk about this in their "help" pages, citing spam subscribers and channels that have been terminated. YouTube have done big purges, but you'll see fluctuations of 1,000 subscribers here and there happen on a near daily basis when it comes to PewDiePie versus T Series. Closed accounts are those terminated due to policy violations and spam subscribers are those subscribers gained through artificial means. I'll just say it one more time, 200% increase in views, 800% increase in subscribers.

Since PewDiePie is, once again at time of writing, ahead of T Series in terms of subscribers, we ask where do all these subscribers even come from?

PewDiePie vs T Series: Where Do the Subscribers Come From?

First of all, let's say congratulations to PewDiePie. The first independent YouTube channel to reach 90 million subscribers. If he was a country, he'd find himself in between Vietnam and Germany. And, of course, let's not forget T Series, who hit the same phenomenal landmark just half an hour later. But, this continued neck-and-neck race between two channels is starting to raise some interesting and hard questions

I think we've all got used to the idea of PewDiePie being overtaken by T Series on occasion. It's happened a number of times, but the curious question is this, having taken a lead, why can't T Series maintain it and indeed stretch it? The gap always seems to be a few thousand subscribers, and doesn't last more than a couple of hours at most. Before by the end of the evening, PewDiePie finds himself maybe 15 to 20,000 subscribers ahead, and then we repeat. As day turns to night or night turns to day, depending on your perspective, PewDiePie has a lead that soon vanishes and now we find T Series once again in the lead. So what's actually going on in the 

PewDiePie vs T Series & the YouTube Algorithm

Now, you could maybe accept this happening for one or two nights in a row while some massive PewDiePie campaign of the likes we've seen before propelling him hundreds of thousands of subscribers ahead. But this type of subscriber fluctuation has been going on for months - almost as if it's being controlled on purpose to help each channel feed off of the continued media interest. It just doesn't make sense for T Series to catch up, and then still not be able to jump ahead of PewDiePie for longer than 24 hours. So what is going on here?

Well, I found a really interesting video by a chap called Mehditation, who talks about a 

. It's really brilliant stuff, and this is what he thinks is happening. We know T Series has been catching up PewDiePie for a long time, years in fact. Before this turned into a race, PewDiePie averaged 30,000 subscribers a day, while T Series would average in excess of 100,000 subscribers a day. Now yes, when it turned into a race PewDiePie got the occasional huge subscriber boost from the YouTube community. But, ultimately, they can only help for so long against a relentless T Series YouTube machine.

But as both channels grind towards 100 million subscribers, the rules of engagement seem to have changed. As if they are magnetized to each other, both channels averaging just under 140,000 subscribers a day. So, how might this happen? Let's go into conspiracy mode. Let's pretend that T Series has millions of fake accounts subscribed to their channel. And as they gather more and more real subscribers, they simply shave off the fake ones. Thus, controlling there ultra consistent subscriber count that they have had for months, if not years. Or, what if it's the complete opposite? What if it's millions of fake accounts that are being pumped into PewDiePie's channel? And as he gains new and legitimate subscribers, the fake ones are simply sliced off the top. Thus, keeping a subscriber pace that PewDiePie's channel has never been able to sustain for such a long period of time. It keeps both channels in the news, and both channels benefit from it.

Now, given the recent numbers, and how the subscriber rate has changed over the last couple of weeks, I find this theory absolutely fascinating with some plausibility. Do I think it's true or not?

In the race for the most subscribers on YouTube, T Series have taken the lead over PewDiePie on many occasions. But why can't they keep a hold of it?

PewDiePie Vs T Series: Why Can't T Series Maintain the Lead?

As the PewDiePie vs T Series battle continues we’re taking a look back at all the high points and learnings from the race for the Channel with the most subscribers on YouTube. In this post, we ask if PewDiePie really tried to hack YouTube in a bid to hold on to his crown?

 that automatically played at twice the speed as normal. This naturally intrigued us as it brought Watch Time and playback speed into focus. Let's talk about the theory first. You can change playback speed on any YouTube video by going to settings, clicking on speed, and then changing it to a quarter speed or double speed. With some very rudimentary math, that means that you could watch a ten minute video at double speed, and it actually only takes you five minutes to watch. And a lot of people do that, including myself. If I am very short on time, and it's a very conversational video, then I'll watch it at double speed, just so I can get through it quicker and watch more content with the time that I have.

That's the viewer's perspective on playback, but what about the video creator? Is there something to gain from this? It's generally accepted that watch time is the most important metric on YouTube. So does slowing down or indeed speeding up the playback of your videos affect watch times positively or negatively.

In this example, what PewDiePie has done is slow his video down in his video editor, so that when you play back at normal speed it's just excruciating. This forces the viewer to change the playback speed to double speed so that it looks and sounds normal. But in YouTube land what actually counts, the 21 minutes of the actual video length, or the ten and a half minutes of real world time that it took you to watch the video? I'm glad you asked because we have the answer.

Earlier in 2018, we uploaded an 18 minute video and set it to private so nobody else could watch it. Then we watched the entire video at double speed, so that we could check the analytics on it. That single view, watching an 18 minute video at double speed resulted in a watch time of nine minutes, exactly half the length of the video itself. What it also gave us, rather weirdly, was audience retention of exactly 50 percent, which is a little confusing.

The next thing we tested was the complete opposite. We uploaded a one minute video to YouTube, set it to private, and watched it at a quarter speed. That meant that in real life it took us four minutes to watch this one minute video. And what did the analytics say? Yep, you guessed it. Four minutes of watch time and rather impressively, four hundred percent audience retention from a single view. Just to clarify that, You Tube watch time is calculated from your physical presence in the real world watching the video. If, and I hasten to underline that, if PewDiePie was trying to game the YouTube system, he got it all backwards.

The simplest way of looking at this, is if you double the playback speed, you have the watch time. Let's say for argument's sake that five million people watched this PewDiePie video, and they watched a full duration of the video at 20 minutes. That would give you, in normal circumstances, one hundred million minutes of watch time. But if it's played at double speed, that halves the physical amount of time the video is watched, and it brings us down to fifty million minutes of watch time. That's still quite a lot of cost.

If you were going to try and hack the YouTube watch time analytics, which of course we do not recommend, you would have to do this. There you have it folks. If our testing was accurate and the analytics haven't changed since then, this video will have had a detrimental effect on PewDiePie's watch time. Which begs the question, why did the currently most subscribed to You Tube channel on the planet do this? I don't know, it's PewDiePie.

ICYMI: As the PewDiePie vs T Series battle rages on we take a look back at the stunts pulled, including the time PewDiePie may have tried to hack YouTube Watch Time in a bid to hold on to his crown.

Did PewDiePie Really Try to Hack YouTube to Beat T Series?

For a brief few minutes on Friday 22nd of February, the King of YouTube, 

, his nearest rival contender. In a race which has gripped the YouTube community and seen PewDiePie fans initiate a number of stunts to keep the gaming creator’s numbers higher than any other YouTube channel, it was a routine audit from the platform that finally give T Series their spot at the top for a whole 20 minutes before PewDiePie regained the lead.

At time of writing, the influencer now has more than a 120K subscriber jump on the Bollywood media distributor, and due to the 

, and other golden promotional opportunities, PewDiePie could possibly be the first YouTuber ever to crash through the 100M subscriber barrier.

A few days ago, VidIQ ran a poll where we asked our followers whether PewDiePie would reach the 100M subscriber mark before T Series. An overwhelming 62% confirmed they did see the influencer smashing this goal but one user brought up the very valid fact that PewDiePie’s numbers may be inflated due to random accounts being created specifically to subscribe to his channel:

There’s no denying that the rallying call to, and between, the Bro Army has kept PewDiePie afloat in the face of sheer content uploads and viewing figures from T Series. But there’s also no denying that PewDiePie’s recent subscriber push may not be totally organic, and that may be a problem.

When YouTube does a purge of a YouTube channel the aim is to eliminate all non-legitimate subscribers and keep only the genuine ones. YouTube has pre-warned creators in the past that channel audits are imminent, but the platform has also carried out these sweeps without warning, which seems to have been the case last week. Socialblade confirmed that PewDiePie’s channel had been one of those affected, and consequently lost around 8K subscribers. It appears that T Series didn’t suffer the same fate, hence the blink-and-you’ll-miss it toppling of the crown.

With subscriber rates being so close between the two channels, it’s surprising that this kind of thing hasn’t happened before and to a much larger degree. But to really hold the lead, T Series needs to have more subscribers than PewDiePie for a significant amount of time to be officially recognised (by us anyway) as the new most subscribed to channel on YouTube.

In the meantime, by inflating his subscriber numbers via account set-ups or stunts, fans may actually be doing PewDiePie a massive disservice. YouTube are going to keep auditing channels and weeding out bots and other false-flag subscribers and view counts and the influencer may lose his top spot because of his rabid fan base and their campaign to keep him King, despite their best intentions.

After months of campaigning, PewDiePie briefly lost his place as the most subscribed to creator on YouTube to arch-rival T Series. Find out what happened and why.

T Series Beats PewDiePie As The Most Subscribed to Channel

T-Series is definitely gonna overtake PewDiePie. No. PewDiePie just got half a million subscribers in a single day.

I woke up to this morning was something quite incredible. First of all, it starts with vidIQ. We did a video last week about another MrBeast antic on the subscriber race. And it'd been doing relatively well, but overnight, it exploded in views. At one point, we were giving it 20,000 views per hour. And that told me something about the current situation with the PewDiePie-versus-T-Series subscriber count. And no doubt, I'm sure you've seen all of these over the past couple of weeks. Live subscriber counts of the battle. The number of people watching these livestreams on Sunday morning exploded. The top result here, FlareTV, at one point had 70,000 people watching the subscriber count. To give you some perspective, that's the entire population of Andorra watching two numbers compete with each other.

This was supposed to be the endgame. The YouTube universe was starting to smell blood. By the end of December the 1st, T-Series was less than a hundred thousand subscribers behind PewDiePie. It seemed as if not even a MrBeast-inspired stunt by Justin Roberts, apparently spending $1 million on a billboard in Times Square, asking people to subscribe to PewDiePie, could save him now.

And by noon, just as PewDiePie surpassed at 73 million subscribers himself, the subscriber gap was down to less than 20,000.

It could've been the billboard, it could've been a tweet, it could've been the livestream. It could've been PewDiePie's latest video with a rather direct title. Or it could've been something going down on Reddit which you're always keen to tell me about in the comments because I forget that corner of the internet. Whatever happened, the subscriber gap between PewDiePie and T-Series has increased once again. The breakdown of the day is astonishing in itself. From noon to nine p.m., PewDiePie gained 350,000 subscribers. Over the course of the entire day, PewDiePie gained 544,000 subscribers.

As for the subscriber gap between PewDiePie and T-Series, you know, the other channel in this story. Well, up until noon, as you can see, it got as close as 16,000 subscribers and then PewDiePie absolutely obliterated T-Series in the second half of the day. Look at the increasing difference between three o'clock and six o'clock. It's astonishing. It should also be noted at this point that T-Series had a pretty good day as well. They average 155,000 subscribers a day, but they doubled that on December the 2nd. And that's rare. Usually, they're very consistent and they don't have such spikes. But what they do have, just like PewDiePie, is passionate, committed fans rallying behind their cause as well.

It was all set to happen on December 2. T Series was less than 20,000 subscribers behind. By the end of the same day, they were only 230,000 subscribers behind.

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