If we look at the website Social Blade and the most popular YouTube channels, the top
four places don’t go to individuals or companies but to categories.
Music is first, gaming is second, sports is third and movies is fourth.
Then coming in fifth and sixth place we have the two channels we will talk about today,
with PewDiePie only just coming above T-Series.
Then again, Social Blade gives PewDiePie only an A grade and it gives T-Series an A++ grade.
The ranking is based on subscribers and not uploads or video views.
The channels that follow in this ranking are Canal KondZilla, Justin Bieber and 5-Minute
Crafts.
But the talk of town right now is the battle between two channels, the ones we’ll discuss
in this episode of the Infographics Show, PewDiePie vs T-Series - How Do They Compare.
Let’s start with some introductions, for those of you who are not familiar with, or
don’t know too many details about how these channels got going.
PewDiePie is a 28-year old Swede called Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg.
While he was studying industrial economics and technology management at university in
Gothenburg he started a YouTube channel.
He dropped out of uni and soon started to concentrate on graphic design and also in
the background, his channel.
No one lives for free and creating content isn’t easy when broke, and it’s well known
that one way he earned an income when he got going was by selling hot dogs.
While the media reports that his parents were wealthy entrepreneurs, it seems young Felix
wasn’t just handed a silver spoon.
Not only was he selling hotdogs, but he told the media his boss made him sell almost raw
hotdogs as cooking them cost too much money.
He said his main love back then was Photoshopping girls, and he almost landed an apprenticeship
working with what he called “the best advertising agency in Scandinavia.”
Maybe it’s a good job he didn’t get it.
Felix’s first channel was actually named PewDie and he registered it on December 19th,
2006.
He forgot his password and so on April 29th, 2010, he started another channel called PewDiePie.
We are told the first video he posted, that you can still watch, is him playing Minecraft.
There is no face cam for this video.
It wasn’t until February 17th, 2011, that he did his first video showing his face.
At this point he had a whopping 2,500 subscribers and had uploaded 100 videos.
Later in the year, it’s said he realized that just playing games wasn’t going to
cut it and he believed that his personality had to shine through.
He was right of course, and on July 10th, 2012, he hit the one-million subscriber mark.
He announces this in one video, seemingly overjoyed, exclaiming, “We frickin’ did
it” while he plays with his pet pug.
That year he would rocket to fame and also infamy, but everyone knows just a little bit
of controversy can be a good thing.
Yep, he made jokes about topics many people thought he shouldn’t be joking about, but
after being scolded by the public and the media he only became more successful.
By January, 2013, his videos had been seen more than a billion times.
We’ll come back later to how well he’s done since then.
T-series, which follows PewDiePie in the YouTube subscriber rankings, had very different beginnings.
The real company name is Super Cassettes Industries Private Limited.
In 1983 it was founded by a guy called Gulshan Kumar.
At the start it was pirating Bollywood songs for business, then it moved into making soundtracks
for movies.
Unfortunately, Kumar’s life was ended abruptly when he was murdered by gangsters from the
Mumbai underworld.
He was hit by 16 bullets as he was coming out of a temple.
People allegedly involved with the crime were other people in the entertainment industry
and a bunch of what the Hindustani Times called “assassins”.
Moving on, T-Series started its YouTube channel on 13th March, 2006, but it would be a few
years until it started uploading content.
That content was mostly music videos and trailers for movies.
We should add that T-Series is what is called a multi-channel network, meaning it owns a
bunch more channels.
How did T-series get so big so quickly?
The answer is quite simple, its popularity grew in line with India’s fast-growing number
of Internet users.
India is the second largest online population in the world at about 500 million users.
Experts say that while this is a huge number, India doesn’t have that many YouTube creators.
With so little choice where do many Indians go to watch their content?
You guessed it, they go to T-Series.
So, after giving you these short introductions you can understand that it would be hard to
compare the channels in terms of content.
While they both strive to entertain, you could say that they are chalk and cheese artistically.
But we can look at their popularity and how that popularity has paid off.
As you know, PewDiePie has the most subscribers.
The number is just above 67.2 million at time of writing.
In a month you can expect there to be about another 800,000 subs added to that.
T-Movies has just over 66.8 million subscribers at time of writing.
But here’s the kicker; in another month you can expect the channel to have perhaps
another 3.5 million subs.
What that means is by the time you watch this show, unless PewDiePie experiences some kind
of miracle, T-Series should have done the overtake.
As for video views daily, T-Series gets anywhere from 70 to 90 million views as we write this.
So, let’s call the average 80 million.
PewDiePie’s video views per day are all over the place, but lately the number has
been around 5 to 8 million views a day.
That’s why T-Series gets that A++ grade we talked about earlier in the show.
But how does this translate to money, which is no doubt the main motivation why these
two channels get out of bed in the morning.
Social Blade gives an estimated yearly earnings, but the minimum and maximum amount is vastly
different.
That’s because advertising revenue is complicated.
Let’s just cheat here a little and see what others say about the earnings of these channels.
One article in the Indian media in 2018 told us that from January to July, 2018, the T-Series
network of 27 properties raked-in around US$100 million.
That’s just below the maximum for T-Series alone that Social Blade gives, which is $115
million a year – not six months.
But as T-Series is a company that does a lot of things and has around 4,000 employees,
let’s just concentrate on what Social Blade says about the channel.
PewDiePie’s maximum earnings as we write this is $7.6 million a year, which is far
lower.
But in Felix’s case, he doesn’t exactly have a large company with many monthly wages
to pay.
The former purveyor of cheap sausages in a bun who once said, “My parents said that
sitting at home playing video games all day won’t bring you anywhere in life” is estimated
right now to have a net worth of around $20 million.
PewDiePie would no doubt have earned himself a lot more money had he not been entangled
in controversy after controversy.
While we said at the beginning of the show that it can pay to overstep the mark at times,
it can also blow-up in your face if you push it too far.
We are not going to go in to all the controversies Felix has caused, but you probably know he’s
been criticized for using racial slurs, for having a toxic fanbase and for even promoting
alt-right ideologies.
In terms of advertising revenue this can be anathema, and Forbes wrote in 2017 that there
is no doubt he would have been much richer had he held his tongue at times.
On the other hand, you could argue this irreverence to political correctness has been what has
charged his campaign.
Yes, his channel is wholly disliked by many people not young or born into what’s called
Generation C. Yes, he is torn to shreds on Twitter and Reddit on a regular basis, but
obviously someone likes him.
His detractors just seem to be more outspoken than his devotees.
His content is also mocked by the mainstream media for being mindless to the extreme, what
Wired called “aggressive stupidity”, but he’s doing something right.
He did start reviewing books, serious books, so obviously PewDiePie isn’t a clown without
a brain.
He even sold his own book, “This Book Loves You” which sold over 112,000 copies.
That’s not bad, but looking at how many people watch his channel we can extrapolate
that making YouTube videos will give you a better living than writing books as we head
into a more digitally connected future.
Maybe readers are a dying breed?
As for T-Series, we can’t really say much about controversy and content as it’s largely
just music and music videos.
There is no digital cult-of-personality like you get with the likes of PewDiePie and Logan
Paul.
Mashable writes that there is no comparison, as T-Series can push out many well-produced
videos a day and poor old Felix is struggling to get one decent piece of content out a day.
Mashable wrote in September, 2018, “The most viewed video uploaded by PewDiePie, the
current king of YouTube, sits at 83 million views.
The T-Series channel’s most viewed video has 565 million views.
In fact, T-Series has 94 videos that surpass PewDiePie’s most popular video when it comes
to view count.”
Soon PewDiePie will be eating the dust kicked up by T-Series which is racing ahead at a
speed so fast Felix won’t even see T-Series fly past.
Does he care?
Well, he released the diss track, the one with lasagna in the name.
And he does sound kind of petty in the track, singing, “You’re trying to dethrone me
for spot number one, but you’re India, you lose, so best thing you haven’t won.”
Maybe it does hurt to get thrown off the top spot.
It’s no masterpiece, but he makes his point.
Saying that, in an interview he talked about him losing his throne.
“I don’t really care about T Series,” he said.
“I genuinely don’t.
I think that if YouTube does shift in a way that’s more corporate… something else
will take its place.”
What do you think?
Does he care about losing his spot?
What about all the criticism he gets for his content?
Does he deserve it?
Are you a fan?
Are you a fan of T-series?
If so, what’s so good about it that it gets so much attention?
Tell us in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other video Average American vs Logan Paul . Thanks for
watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.