Flyers asking to subscribe to PewDiePie on Mirpur Road | Courtesy

There is an online battle for YouTube subscribers, and it has spilled across national borders

If you happen to walk down Mirpur Road near Mirpur 14, you might see a series of red flyers stapled trees. If you look twice, rejecting the urge or dismissing the poster as just another political outreach, you might see a recognizable face – PewDiePie.

A dedicated group of PewDiePie fans in Bangladesh have been campaigning for the YouTube vlogger to increase subscribers. They have put up flyers on a 3km stretch of Mirpur Road.

Why?

So PewDiePie, who is possibly the biggest YouTuber of all time, is in trouble. Nope, not lawsuits or financial difficulties, although the latter could be a likely outcome.

Two PewDiePie fans put up a flyer on Mirpur Road urging people to subscribe to his channel | Courtesy

Swedish-born Felix Kjellberg has 68,548,408 subscribers as of composing this article. That is 68.5 million and change, and rising with every passing hour.

However, India’s music label titan T-Series is fiercely challenging PewDiePie’s record as the YouTube channel with the single most subscribers with 68,238,962 subscribers and rising of its own.





T-Series just launched a counterattack, gear up, we must advance at dawn. pic.twitter.com/7ze7yQ82Hb — MrBeast (@MrBeastYT) October 30, 2018





PewDiePie has been at the top since 2013 with 19,030,464,292 or 19 billion views against the staggering 52,138,376,469 or 52 billion views by T-Series.

Fellow YouTuber Mr Beast has apparently been spending money on billboards and radio advertisement to raise subscribers for PewDiePie. It is indeed ironic that the digital medium, which was a revolution against conventional platforms, has resorted to rely on the same medium it was designed to replace.





I bought a bunch of billboards, did radio ads, bought a newspaper page, bathroom ads, airport ads, invterviews, and much more to advertise pewdiepie and stop T-Series.



Go watch my new video or T-Series will win. — MrBeast (@MrBeastYT) October 26, 2018





The battle for YouTube supremacy is spiraling out of control.

Online analysts claimed that T-Series would overtake PewDiePie by October 29, 2018. On November 2, the battle is still going strong, but the odds are in favour of T-Series.

The Indian music channel posts music videos from the Indian film industry. It has a bigger potential audience base than PewDiePie’s, thanks to India’s increasing internet usage. T-Series can post several video in the same time it takes PewDiePie to make one. It is the story of an individual versus a corporation.

PewDiePie also released a diss track on T-Series to stress the importance of this feud. He views this as a threat to independent content creators and how social media platforms view them.





The Bangladeshi fans said that while they were putting up the flyers, they were approached by two people.

One of them turned out to be a PewDiePie fan himself and expressed appreciation for what they were doing. The other was impressed regardless and asked the members of the Bro Army (nickname for PewDiePie’s fanbase) to use his phone to subscribe to the channel.

The Bangladeshi efforts are being tracked on Reddit, where a post about this campaign has 24,693 upvotes.

We, meanwhile, will sit this one out and keep an eye out on how things unfold in the coming days.