Anurag Verma News18.com

Updated on: April 1, 2019, 2:32 PM IST

April 1, 2019, 2:32 PM IST FOLLOW US ON: Facebook Twitter Instagram

Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg aka PewDiePie was recently dethroned as the most-subscribed channel on YouTube by Noida-based music label T-Series. The production company is currently ahead of the Swedish gamer-comedian by 50,000 subscribers. But now PewDiePie wants to call it quits from the platform over which he has reigned for the past five years.

If you haven't been in sync with the "YouTube subscriber war," ever since the news of T-Series nearing PewDiePie's sub count broke on the Internet last year, hordes of rattled fans across the globe have devised genius ways to run the "Subscribe to PewDiePie" campaign in an attempt to keep the 29-year-old gamer ahead.


Here are a few of them:


Mr Beast, a popular YouTuber star, showed up at the Super Bowl game with his squad wearing the "Sub 2 PewDiePie" t-shirts in February.


The YouTuber also bought a bunch of billboards in North Carolina and turned them into advertisements asking people to subscribe to PewDiePie.

Then, another YouTuber Justin Roberts bought a billboard apparently worth a million dollars in New York’s Times Square for the same cause.

There's more.

Rokonujjam Konok, a Facebook user and a student, took to his account to share the deets of his unusual campaign with his friends in Mirpur. They went around distributing the 'pewds' posters and asking people to subscribe to the YouTube channel. PewDiePie isn't quitting. We lied. April Fool's Day!

Yep, that's how much PewDiePie fandom has spread in Bangladesh.

PewDiePie supporters also hacked at least 50,000 printers that spat out a message that encouraged people to subscribe to the Internet star and unsubscribe from T-Series.

It keeps on going...

While it has only been a one-sided beef for months, T-Series' chairman and managing director Bhushan Kumar finally arrived at the scene and made a humble appeal to Indian audiences and Bollywood fans to subscribe to his channel. We repeat, PewDiePie isn't quitting. It's just a prank, bro!

“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,” Bhushan said in a video posted from his official Twitter account.

And then T-Series raced past PewDiePie for the first time on 22nd February 2019 (a couple of weeks before Bhushan's plea) and has since beaten PewDiePie 11 times in March alone.

But is the inevitable defeat to T-Series and the #2 spot on YouTube the reason PewDiePie is bidding goodbye to the platform?

Nope. PewDiePie, in fact, congratulated T-Series on winning the sub war.

Turns out PewDiePie is starting his own music label company in Sweden and wants to focus on it completely. This is something he's mentioned to his bro army in a video previously.

He made his big announcement in a video he posted on Monday, 1st April. Also, Happy April Fool's Day.