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.

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.

• More: Logan Paul explains why he messed up by taking shots at comedian Chris D’Elia

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.

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.

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.