



Pewdiepie Represents Old YouTube





Back in 2012, Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, the Pewdiepie was the undisputed King of YouTube. An ordinary guy who combined his love of YouTube with his love of gaming became the #1 subscribed YouTube Channel in 2013, and he held that title until T-Series overtook him on March 27th, 2019. While Pewdiepie was able to temporarily take back is spot for the #1 spot for subscribers several times throughout 2019, T-Series was the first channel to reach 100 million subscribers and now holds the #1 spot for highest number of subscribers, now holding over a whooping 122 million, while Pewdiepie now only holds the #2 spot with a total of over 102 million subscribers.





Pewdiepie still is the #1 most subscribed individual YouTuber, however with T-Series overtaking Pewdiepie, it represents YouTube's endorsement of corporate channels. While the subscriber count of T-Series is the most of any channel ever in the history of YouTube, does that subscriber count actually translate to more effective results for the channel? The Youtuber EmpLemon suggests that subscribers no longer matters as much as they did during Pewdiepie's rise to the #1 spot back in 2013.





While Pewdiepie is still going strong despite the backlash he's received from YouTube and the mainstream media, him being dethroned from being the most subscribed channel on YouTube represents how YouTube wants to move towards more safe and inoffensive content. It seems like the days of an regular person rising to fame on YouTube is over, and Pewdiepie remains as a relic to the way YouTube used to be.













What Really Matters to Become and Stay Successful on YouTube









Watch time has become YouTube's most prevalent evaluation metric, and what this metric seems to communicate to the vast amount of creators on YouTube is to fill the run time as much and as fast as possible. Corporations would obviously hold the most advantages over individual creators in terms of churning out way more videos in a shorter amount of time. There is only so much quality content a single Youtuber can pump out in a short period of time without quality taking a massive hit. Because of YouTubers having to fill their videos with more run time, this has encouraged several YouTubers like Jake Paul and Logan Paul to fill their videos with mind numbing content, as they are unable to make quality videos in terms of how it engages the audience.





The YouTuber EmpLemon has also pointed out how many channels have what he calls "empty subscribers", which he describes as the concept that even though a YouTube channel may have a high subscriber count, that does not necessarily mean a YouTube channel is doing well in terms of their channel size and viewer engagement. He calculates empty subscribers by calculating as follows: Empty Subscribers Ratio = (Total Number of Subscribers - Average # of channel views) / (Total Number of Subscribers). Calculations can range 0-1, and the closer the calculation is to 1, the better your channel is doing relative to your subscriber count and average amount of views.





I applied this logic to Pewdiepie and T-Series to evaluate how their doing based on this line of reasoning and here is what I found:





Pewdiepie's Empty Subscriber Ratio = (102,000,000 - 5,999,560) / 102,000,000 ≈ 0.941





T-Series Empty Subscriber Ratio = (122,000,000 - 6,524,285) / 122,000,000 ≈ 0.947





Based on these calculations, Pewdiepie and T-Series have about the same engagement with their viewers which is very close to 1, with Pewdiepie only trailing slightly behind T-Series. Both channels have high viewer engagement relative to their size. While Pewdiepie has held out strong against the setbacks he's faced from YouTube, but one must wonder if he and other individual creators have a chance of competing with channels like T-Series in the future. As it stands, it seems like this corporate style of content making will become more prevalent for YouTube in the future.



















