YouTube subscriber purge helps PewDiePie in battle vs T-Series

PewDiePie’s ongoing fight to remain the most subscribed YouTube channel, with Indian record label T-Series on his tail, has been given a boost – thanks to YouTube itself.

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Felix ‘PewDiePie’ Kjellberg has had the most subscribed channel on YouTube for over seven years, but when T-Series began gaining subscribers at a ridiculous rate, PewDiePie, his fans and other YouTubers began to fear the worst.

The pushback against T-Series overtaking PewDiePie is largely down to a feeling among creators and users that YouTube is becoming more corporate, moving away from its roots of everyday people with a camera.

The battle between YouTube’s top channels has become a trending topic.

PewDiePie very much represents that classic YouTube style of an everyday person talking into a camera, while T-Series represents the corporate takeover.

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So, many YouTubers and fans have been doing their part to assist PewDiePie, Such as MrBeast’s ad campaign, hacking printers with messages reading ‘subscribe to PewDiePie’, and even a massive billboard in Time Square, New York.

But now, it appears even YouTube themselves are doing their part. As part of a recent ‘purge’, YouTube removed millions of “spam subscriptions” – dropping T-Series by over 300,000, while PewDiePie lost only 80,000, approximately.

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It looks like YouTube paid attention to all the demands to take a “close look” at T-Series sub count especially.

When they announced that the subscriber ‘purge’ would take place, lots of commenters on both Twitter and Google Groups demanded that T-Series subscribers were investigated.

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It means that PewDiePie is now comfortably in the lead over T-Series – hitting 77 million on December 16, while T-Series lags behind on 75,600,000 – when at one point the gap was as close as only 40,000.

• More: PewDiePie vs T-Series – Live real-time YouTube subscriber counts

It seemed clear that no matter what efforts PewDiePie made, at one point T-Series would eventually take over, given the population of India and how popular T-Series’ content is in the country.

However, thanks to the community, fans, and now YouTube too, PewDiePie has taken a commanding lead.