For the longest time, PewDiePie was the most popular YouTuber ever – in terms of the number of subscribers he had. Many in India first woke up to the PewDiePie phenomenon when soap queen Ekta Kapoor engaged in a Twitter war against him. Then it was the tussle between the YouTuber and the prominent Indian entertainment company T Series. This is the situation now:
When he as at 70 million subscribers, PewDiePie’s popularity seemed to be unassailable. It was an unequal contest: one guy against a massive corporation, but since the guy made it a prestige issue of sorts everyone got interested. This was bound to happen. Right now T Series has a seemingly unbeatable lead with 200 million subscribers.
He is nowhere near T-Series. Again it is a completely unequal contest – a lone guy starting out with a camera versus a decades-old company with massive resources, reach and huge volumes of varied content. Now Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, aka PewDiePie is at 110 million subscribers vis-à-vis T-Series at 200 million. It still gives him bragging rights that he clung to the No 1 spot for as long as he did: from 15 August 15 2013 for a period of 2050 days.
This channel is at No 2, with 123 Million subscribers, several million subscribers more than PewDiePie. Cocomelon - Nursery Rhymes is a channel that features animated kids music videos. Being beaten; in fact, being left to eat the dust of a children’s nursery rhyme channel has to be humiliating for the guy who had no compunction jeering at and humiliating others online.
SET India is at number 3 with 121 million subscribers and Zee Music Company is at 79 million subscribers. SET or Sony Entertainment Television is a channel where viewers can catch entire episodes of popular TV shows, older shows, music videos, reality TV shows, short clips and more.
This platform featuring interesting, informative and inventive videos is still among the most popular YouTube channels at No 10. Life hacks, how to videos, solutions to common problems it’s all here in these short videos which last for a few seconds to a few minutes. Sure it’s very click-baity but it is a lot of fun as well.
Justin Bieber is the music artist music snobs love to hate on (including me). He is the YouTube phenomenon, and he owed his early popularity to the video-sharing service. His fan base was created via YouTube; one of the main reasons the word ‘Beliebers’ was one of the top words of 2010. He held the record for the most subscribed solo artist on YouTube for 6 years. However, this guy now is not at no 13 with 66 M subscribers and is actually one rung below these girls.
It is a testament to the incredible popularity of K Pop all over the world, that this girl band from South Korea has more subscribers than Justin Bieber. These girls have 70 million subscribers though their first album debuted only about 5 years ago. Listen to this song to know why they are so popular – they have an addictive sound. So these girls overtook the Bieber; PewDiePie shouldn’t feel bad about being upstaged by a nursery rhyme channel.
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