A bruising fight for YouTube supremacy has gained momentum, with T-Series becoming the platform's most-viewed channel.
As of February 3, T-Series, one of India's biggest record labels and movie studios, has racked up 60.7 billion views, far outshining PewDiePie's 20.2 billion.
The world's highest-paid YouTuber, Pewds (real name: Felix Kjellberg) may have lost the battle, but the war is still in full swing. He still has some 76,000 more subscribers than T-Series, but analysts say he will eventually lose his crown as the king of YouTube in this uneven fight.
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This could happen as early as January, but YouTube's recent removal of spam accounts has played into the hands of the Swedish vlogger. He said that as a result of the purge, he lost only 40,000 subscribers, while T-Series reportedly had 200,000 "casualties".
Kjellberg's legion of fans is nevertheless willing to not let him give up that easily, with some of them going to considerable lengths: Mr. Beast, an American YouTuber with 13 million subscribers, hired every billboard in his hometown to promote PewDiePie, while some other fanboys played "B*tch Lasagna", his diss track roasting T-Series, at dance clubs.
A bunch of tech-savvy fans have hacked thousands of media-streaming devices, such as Google Chromecasts, to make users' computers, smartphones and TVs to play a video encouraging them to subscribe to his channel.
Statistics reveal that a whopping 13 million people joined the Swede's YouTube channel between September and December as part of the campaign to keep him on the throne, with over 6 million subscribing in December alone — notably a 700-percent boost in growth since September.
