PewDiePie Reaches YouTube Milestone With 80 Million Subscribers During T-Series Rivalry

PewDiePie has become the first YouTuber to reach 80 million subscribers, a YouTube milestone that he owes in part to his ongoing rivalry with the T-Series channel.

The Swedish YouTuber currently has 80,235,226 subscribers at the time of writing, a number which no other YouTuber has ever reached. That includes the India-based channel called T-Series which has been amassing more and more subscribers recently and looked to rival PewDiePie’s channel. T-Series currently sits at 79,491,050 subscribers, though both of those numbers are changing nearly every second as the counts go up and down with two different groups of fans pushing their YouTubers’ subscriber counts higher. PewDiePie hasn’t ever been passed by T-Series, though it at times looked like it might happen.

PewDiePie’s seemingly never-ending race against T-Series helped bring in a ton of followers that have already helped push him beyond projections of what his subscriber counts would look like in several months. The YouTuber used the competition to his advantage by releasing a music video where he dissed T-Series, that video being the one which would go on to be his most-viewed video of all time. While the race brought in subscribers who rallied to support PewDiePie and keep him on top, there were also some questionable efforts made by his supporters during the campaign.

One of the strangest events to end 2018 on occurred late in the year when thousands of printers were hacked to print out messages urging people to subscribe to PewDiePie. The printed messaged called for people to support PewDiePie and subscribe to his channel to keep him out of T-Series’ reach. It wasn’t PewDiePie himself who did the hacking, but the group responsible for the event struck again less than a month after the first wave of hackings. This next message pushed the same agenda – “PewDiePie is in trouble and he needs your help to defeat T-Series!” the messages would say – but it also urged people to better secure their printers. The second round of messages warned of the harm that such attacks could do to unsecured devices and told people how to secure their printers so that further attacks wouldn’t happen.

PewDiePie’s race against T-Series is still going on despite the YouTuber reaching this milestone, so it remains to be seen whether the Indian music channel will ever surpass the current king of YouTube.