“Doomsday it's all over bois..”
Felix Kjellberg's tweet reeks of defeat. He knows the battle between Indian record label T Series and his own channel PewDiePie could soon be over, all thanks to YouTube's action on spam subscriptions.
The tweet came hours after YouTube announced the cleansing of spam accounts on its platform. Giving a heads up, the Google subsidiary warned channels that there could be a noticeable decrease in subscriber count on December 13-14.
“We regularly verify the legitimacy of accounts and actions on your YouTube channel. We’ve recently identified and fixed an issue that caused some spam not to be removed. Today/tomorrow, we’ll be taking action and removing subscribers that were in fact spam from our systems.
“Removing spam from the platform helps ensure that YouTube remains a fair playing field for everyone and should result in higher confidence that you’re organically building a community of authentic fans,” YouTube wrote on its forum.
PewDiePie's tweet declaring game over hints that the Swedish content creator could have a lot of fake subscribers.
However, the army of Pewds (as young followers of PewDiePie call themselves), are predicting the end for T-Series.
“RIP T SERIES”, “T series is over lol”, “t-series aint nothing but fake subscribers” and similar-natured messages turned up on YouTube's forum.
T Series is a household name in India and has been existing since the 1980s. It hosts some of the biggest names in the Indian music industry, drawing millions of views.
Lead by Bhushan Kumar, son of T Series founder Gulshan Kumar, the company has 29 TV channels in several Indian languages. Gulshan Kumar was allegedly murdered by the Mumbai underworld syndicate D-Company in 1997. The incident took the India media by storm back then, with television channels devoting hours to cover the shock assassination.
Earlier this year, its YouTube account had about 30 million subscribers. But thanks to landmark changes in Indian mobile and data service, the subscriber list sky-rocketed to over 70 million in mere six months. The online video channel also accounts for nearly 25 per cent of its sales, which is about $100 million.
PewDiePie, a game commentary and comic-oriented YouTube channel, held the mantle of most subscribed for five-years in a row. Despite the highest number of subscribers, PewDiePie failed to make it to YouTube Rewinds two years in a row over his controversial comments. His followers mostly include youngsters in the seven to ten years age bracket.
At the time of filing this story, T Series had 75,446,351 subscribers, while PewDiePie had 76,600,544 subscribers.