Pewdiepie Loses Title of Most Popular YouTube Channel to Corporate Giant T-Series

• For months, there has been a struggle between independent YouTube creator Pewdiepie and the corporate powered channel T-Series for the position of most subscribed channel.
• Independent creators urged their followers to “Subscribe to Pewdiepie” but Pewdiepie was recently surpassed by an Indian media company T-Series.
• Pewdiepie was recently passed in the subscriber count by T-Series, briefly jumping ahead again, before falling behind for a second time.

The controversial and popular Youtube channel Pewdiepie, created by Felix Kjellberg, has been surpassed by the Indian corporate giant T-Series, after leading YouTube in subscribers for over 6 years.

T-Series’s take over was expected by many to happen in late 2018, but efforts from the YouTube community kept Pewdiepie on top. On March 18, T-Series finally surpassed him by 1,000 subscribers.

This takeover was not unprecedented, as Indian’s internet industry has been booming as of late, and T-Series has been accused by many of using sub bots, which artificially gives the channel subscribers.

While this seems somewhat harmless, it displays the corporate domination of YouTube that has been on the rise for quite some time. YouTube has continued to back up corporations and abandon their independent content creators.

A much talked about example of this can be seen in YouTube’s 2018 rewind, their celebration and summary of the year on YouTube. The Rewind was met with plenty of negative backlash, due to corporate personalities like Trevor Noah, Jimmy Kimmel, and Will Smith being mainly featured in the Rewind, in replacement of YouTube’s staple creators like Pewdiepie and h3h3productions.