The battleground called YouTube has a clear winner, for the moment. For the last few months, music label and film production company, T-Series, has been in close competition with the channel called PewDiePie, run by a 29-year-old Swedish comic Felix Kjellberg. As of Thursday, T-Series came on top crossing more than 100 million subscribers, while PewDiePie was at 9,62,24,823 (at last count).
About eight months ago, Bhushan Kumar, chairman and managing director, T-Series, became aware of ‘PewDiePie versus T-Series’, a online phenomenon that counts the two channels’ subscribers in real time. To get more followers, T-Series launched an online campaign sharing videos with #BharatWinsYouTube. PewDiePie too released a video in August last year titled, ‘This channel will overtake PewDiePie!’ in an attempt to maintain his lead.
PewDiePie, who enjoyed the number one position for close to five years, garnered support from popular YouTubers and even the CEO of SpaceX, Elon Musk. Now, the number two channel – which primarily features funny videos – is miles ahead of channels such as 5-Minute Crafts (55 million), WWE (43 million), and musicians such as Justin Beiber (45 million) and Ariana Grande (35 million).
Launched in January 2011, the T-Series YouTube Channel has 29 sub-channels and has the most viewed videos. “A constant surge of new music, early adaptation, and first mover advantage went in our favour,” Mr. Kumar said.
“We pushed our content across offline media and social media platforms without any doubt about what we could achieve; it helped drive traffic to our channel,” he said.
From making music to licensing and publishing content across several media platforms, T-Series features a variety of content. “[The] achievement rightly proves that content is the king,” said Vinod Bhanushali, president – marketing, media and publishing (TV) and music acquisitions, T-Series.
To ensure that audiences are presented new content every day, Mr. Bhanushali said T-Series is making music via films produced in-house and acquiring music in an attempt to bring back the era of music videos/singles. T-Series has close to 18 films lined up in 2019, several of which are under production for 2020.
In the battle of shifting numbers in a virtual world, T-Series has won for now, that is until PewDiePie and the channel’s die-hard fans decide to strike back.