Overview

The Great Subscriber War, also known as the Subscribe to PewDiePie movement, refers to an ongoing campaign to keep PewDiePie as the most subscribed-to channel on YouTube. The campaign started in 2018 after it was predicted that T-Series, a channel which produces Bollywood music videos, would soon surpass PewDiePie. As of December 7th, 2018, the campaign has been successful at keeping PewDiePie the most popular channel on YouTube.

Background

On August 30th, 2018, Social Blade^[1] released a graph tracking the subscribers counts of PewDiePie T-Series, suggesting that if both subscriber counts rose at the same rate, T-Series would overtake PewDiePie by October (the graph as it looks on December 7th, 2018 shown below).

Developments

On October 5th, 2018, PewDiePIe responded to the channel's encroachment on his subscriber count with a satirical diss track titled "bitch lasagna" (shown below).

A coordinated effort by PewDiePie's fans has kept him number 1 as of October 30th, 2018. One of those efforts was from YouTuber MrBeast, who bought billboards to encourage people to subscribe to PewDiePie. His video about the stunt gained over 9 million views (shown below).

On October 21st, PewDiePie posted a Q&A video in which he answered a question about T-Series (shown below). He responded, "It's already a heated subject now that a company is taking over. Everyone is going on the rant, 'YouTube is not really becoming YouTube' and, 'it's never going to be the same now'… I don't really care about T-Series, I genuinely don't, but I think if YouTube does shift in a way where it does feel more corporate, [then] something else will take its place. I think people enjoy this connection so much, I think something else will just show up, if it feels too corporate."

69 Million Subscribers Milestone

On November 6th, 2018, PewDiePie published a video titled "We made history!!!!" in which he announced that his channel had reached 69 million subscribers before T-Series (shown below).

Printer Hack

On November 30th, 2018, Grandayy tweeted a photograph of a printed messaged urging readers to unsubscribe from T-Series, subscribe to PewDiPie and use the hashtag "#SavePewDiePie" on social media. Within 72 hours, the tweet gained over 59,100 likes and 10,000 retweets.

That day, Twitter user @HackerGiraffe claimed responsibility for the hack, calling for viewers to "spread the word" about printer security vulnerabilities. According to The Verge, TheHackerGiraffe discovered 800,000 vulnerable printers while browsing the internet-connected device repoistory Shodan.io, and sent the message to only 50,000 of them.

“People underestimate how easy a malicious hacker could have used a vulnerability like this to cause major havoc. Hackers could have stolen files, installed malware, caused physical damage to the printers and even use the printer as a foothold into the inner network. The most horrifying part is: I never considered hacking printers before, the whole learning, downloading and scripting process took no more than 30 minutes.”

On December 2nd, PewDiePie uploaded a video titled "Pewdiepie Printer Hack," which discussed the printer exploit (shown below). Within 24 hours, the video accumulated upwards of 7.6 million views and 73,700 comments.

Notable Support

Times Square Billboard

On November 30th, 2018, YouTuber Justin Roberts posted a video in which he showed himself purchasing a $1 million billboard in Times Square for PewDiePie.

Markiplier Stream

On December 2nd, Markiplier hosted a stream titled "I Literally Won't Shut Up Until You Subscribe To PewDiePie," gaining over 3.3 million views and 46,000 comments.

JackSepticEye also posted a tweet encouraging his followers to subscribe to PewDiePie, gaining over 28,000 retweets (shown below, left). Logan Paul also encouraged his followers to subscribe to PewDiePie (shown below, right).

India Charity

PewDiePie responded to all the support the following day thanking Markiplier and others. He also celebrated gaining over 540,000 subscribers the day of the stream. He also announced that he had created a fundraiser for a charity called CRY which focuses on making a better future for kids in India.

Live Count

FlareTV is hosting a stream comparing the subscriber counts of both accounts (shown below).

Wall Street Journal Hack

On December 17th, 2018, the frontpage of the Wall Street Journal was compromised by hackers who posted a fake apology to PewDiePie for "misrepresentation by our journalists" and called for viewers to subscribe to PewDiePie to "beat Tseries to 80 million" (shown below).

Middle School Classroom Video

On December 15th, 2018, Twitter user @Rissian tweeted a video containing audio of a history teacher at the Hamilton International Middle School in Seattle, Washington telling students that sharing PewDiePie videos was "promoting ignorance, racism, genocide, anti-Semitism" and that students could get in legal trouble for sharing PewDiePie's content (shown below). Within five days, the video gained over 44,000 retweets and 12,500 likes.

That day, PewDiePie retweeted the video along with the message "RT if you're against everything this dumbass teacher is saying."^[2] Also on December 18th, Twitter user @DewsNewz tweeted a video of Alex Jones calling for viewers to support PewDiePie against T-Series (shown below).

On December 19th, the news site KUOW^[3] published an article about the incident, reporting that the controversy began when posters urging people to subscribe to PewDiePie's channel began appearing around the school. Additionally, the article contained a statement by Hamilton Principal Dorian Manza, who revealed the school contacted the Seattle Police Department over the controversy:

"As time went on, the post was retweeted by many others and as sometimes happens in social media, negative comments and language were included. While the language did not include a direct threat, out of an abundance of caution, we responded by contacting the Seattle Police Department."

On December 20th, 2018, PewDiePie uploaded a video titled "WSJ apologizes to PewDiePie!", which discussed the video and the Wall Street Journal hack (shown below).

Chromecast Hack

In late December 2018, some Chromecast users began seeing their televisions switch to a video uploaded by hackers HackerGiraffe and j3ws3r, alerting viewers that their devices were "exposed to the public internet" and urging them to subscribe to PewDiePie and turn off Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) on their Wi-Fi router. The video, which included audio from the PewDiePie diss track "Bitch Lasanga," has since been removed.

On December 31st, Redditor Killimansorrow submitted a post about the hack to /r/Chromecast,^[4] to which an account named GraceFromGoogle identified as a "Google community manager" replied that the hack was not a vulnerability in the Chromecast device, but a vulnerability in the UPnP router feature. On January 2nd, 2019, PewDiePie tweeted about the hack, stating that @hackergiraffe was "doing gods work" (shown below).^[5]

YouTube Gaming Overtake and Another Wave of Support

On January 18th, 2019, PewDiePie subscriber count exceeded^[6] the number of subscribers of YouTube's auto-generated Gaming channel, leaving him behind only YouTube's Music channel.

On January 20th, 2019, the subscriber gap between PewDiePie and T-Series dropped below 100,000 mark.^[7] On the same day animator Andrei Terbea posted a video titled "Why Pewdiepie NEEDS To Hit 100 Million Subs!" which received over 1.2 million views in three days (shown below, left). On January 21st, YouTuber VoiceoverPete held a live broadcast in which he urged his viewers to subscribed to PewDiePie (shown below, center). On the same day, eighth most subscribed YouTube channel Dude Perfect called for its viewers to subscribe to PewDiePie during a live broadcast (shown below, right). The stream and its recording gained over 6 million views in two days.

On January 22nd, 2019, PewDiePie posted the video "This is the end…" in which he reviewed several memes about the decreasing subscriber gap which were submitted to /r/PewdiepieSubmissions subreddit.

As of January 22nd, 2019, the subscriber gap between the channels increased to over 270,000 people. The decrease and the subsequent increase of the gap sparked an influx of related memes on /r/PewdiepieSubmissions subreddit.

MrBeast's Super Bowl LIII Stunt

On February 3rd, 2019, Keemstar tweeted a photograph of MrBeast standing with several other men wearing T-shirts that spelled out "Sub 2 PewDiePie" while attending "Super Bowl LIII": (shown below).

Super Bowl Sunday Livestreams

On February 3rd, PewDiePie launched a livestream in response to combat the tightening subscriber gap with T-Series (shown below).

That day, Keemstar held an "emergency broadcast" livestream to support PewDiePie (shown below, left). Meanwhile, Voiceoverpete held a similar livestream (shown below, right).

Search Interest

External References