The rivalry between T-Series and PewDiePie broke out in 2018 – with both trying to claim the title of most subscribed YouTube channel. Having over 88.7 million subscribers, the difference between the two YouTube channels stand at 22.8K and counting.
Three days back, Bhushan Kumar, the chairman and managing director of T-Series, posted a video on Twitter appealing the Indian crowd to subscribe to its channel and beat PewDiePie, which is handled by a Swedish YouTuber Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, to show “patriotism”.
In the Twitter video posted from his account, Bhusan said, “There is an Indian YouTube channel on the brink of becoming world’s number 1. It has taken us a lot of effort to come this far. To take my father Mr Gulshan Kumar’s dream forward, I started this channel. Today, it belongs to you, to the entire nation. It’s a historic moment for all of us. So let’s come together and subscribe to T-Series YouTube channel and make India proud,” and floated the tag #bharatwinsyoutube.
Right after the video hit the social media, the fans of PewDiePie replied with a variety of memes reading “Subscribe to PewDiePie”. After the video was posted by Bhushan, PewDiePie himself said that “they [T-Series] are getting desperate.”
Ever since the digital war broke out many Bollywood actors and actresses have shown their support for T-Series. Bollywood actress Nora Fatehi took to the social media and shared a video saying, “This is huge! T-series is on the verge of becoming the world’s biggest YouTube channel,” appealing the people to subscribe to T-Series.
Many other Bollywood celebrities have also come out in support of T-Series, including Anil Kapoor and Adnan Sami.
A day ago PewDiePie’s followers even vandalised the national war memorial in the US and wrote ‘Subscribe to PewDiePie’. Even Tesla’s Elon Musk joined the campaign by taking part in an episode of ‘meme review’ in PewDiePie’s channel – which caused the subscriber gap to widen to 200,000 before falling to 22.8k.