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Listener supported. WNYC Studios. Hey, it's Micah. This is the On The Media Midweek Podcast. Something happened on the internet this week that was at once huge and also kind of a foregone conclusion. Jimmy Donaldson, better known as Mr. Beast, has been for many years basically the king of YouTube.
But as of a few days ago, MrBeast is now officially the most subscribed to YouTuber in the world with 271 million followers at time of recording. His clickbaity game show style videos with their extravagant sets and giant payouts have come to define this era of the site. Behind me are 100 people and they range from the age one all the way to age 100. And they're going to be convinced
Remember Squid Game, the Korean Netflix sensation? That show got around 265 million views.
Mr. Beast's real-life Squid Game video got 616 million views. I recreated every single set from Squid Game in real life. And whichever one of these 456 people survives the longest wins 456 grand. That's why he's number one. And there's actually a very interesting history behind the jockeying for YouTube's top spot.
To get there, Mr. Beast had to surpass a giant Indian entertainment company, T-Series, 266 million subscribers, which had been number one for years. In 2019, I worked with Brooke on a piece about the last time a big Western YouTuber went head-to-head with T-Series.
Back then, it was a guy who was sort of the Mr. Beast of his era, a YouTuber known as PewDiePie. How's it going, everyone? My name is PewDiePie. So PewDiePie is a character played by Felix Schellberg. He is a caustic and funny gamer. Clay Shirky is a tech writer and vice provost of educational technology at New York University. He's tracked PewDiePie's nine-year rise to the top of YouTube. He's Swedish. He lives in England. He's 29.
And he's one of the first generation of YouTubers who did it as a hobby and converted it to a career. Fridays were purified.
On a Friday. PewDiePie's subscriber count started to rise on the appeal of a now classic genre of videos called Let's Play. As in, you watch him goof around while he plays a game. He's now got 80 million subscribers. But two years ago, he started dipping into controversy. All right, Disney cutting ties with...
What is this? PewDiePie. PewDiePie. The Wall Street Journal reporting that PewDiePie, the world's highest paid YouTube star, posted nine videos featuring anti-Semitic comments or Nazi imagery. The Wall Street Journal reported that a January 11th video showed two men holding a sign that said death to all Jews, allegedly hired by the 27-year-old internet personality. Google cut PewDiePie from its lucrative preferred ad program and canceled his premium YouTube original series.
PewDiePie, by the way, did not respond to any of our requests for comment. I am sorry for the words that I used, as I know they offended people.
I do strongly believe that you can joke about anything. Here's the thing, though. The media takes what I say out of context to portray me as a Nazi. Old school media does not like Internet personalities because they're scared of us. The context question is often used as a get out of jail card to say to people, I don't want to be held to standards other than those held by my own audience. And I buy that.
I buy that. I do. But there's this really smart anthropologist, Crystal Abedin, and she went through a lot of the citations of PewDiePie's transgressions that were assembled by the Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal circulated a still of PewDiePie supposedly making the Nazi salute.
When this was actually him just extending his arm and pointing off screen. There was another one that the Wall Street Journal did of PewDiePie donning a uniform and watching Hitler videos. When this was actually the second half of a longer snippet in which PewDiePie first refuted Trump.
earlier media accusations that he was a Nazi and then jokingly donning a British uniform while pretending to watch clips of Hitler's speech to depict how he thinks the media views him. I mean, this isn't just casual context. No, that's right. But I don't think there's any claim of being out of context that saves the death to all Jews stunt. Actually, I watched that entire thing. And it
He was asking a whole bunch of people to do things that he knew they wouldn't do. And this was one that he had put in that group on Fiverr, who for a certain amount of money will do something on video that you request. He'd asked for outrageous things. No one did it. And for five bucks, two guys from India did this death to all Jews thing. And you see it.
His reaction... I am sorry. I didn't think they would actually do it. I feel partially responsible, but just I didn't think they would... And he looks genuinely shocked. He just never expected it. Now, should he have done that? Was it...
really obnoxious and creepy. Yeah, but I think he kind of conceded that himself. Yeah, but that to me says he can sort of have it both ways. There's a Wall Street Journal article that's out written by the Daily Stormer's favorite group of guys exposing plans to take
♪ Make it white ♪ ♪ Hitler is PewDiePie ♪ - The problem with PewDiePie is not that he's a Nazi, the problem is that he's an asshole. And he wants to be both edgy and not upset people because his audience expects edginess but his advertisers expect not upsetting people. And one of his constant complaints about people pushing back on his edgy content, which often involves racial slurs or using the word retarded, casual homophobia, these kinds of things,
is that he's being held to a standard that his own audience doesn't have. He's now finally being treated as a cultural figure who says something about the larger society. He's not just a gamer mouthing off to amuse other gamers. PewDiePie's mounting controversies had little effect in his ranking as the most subscribed-to YouTuber until the rise of the Indian super channel T-Series.
- It's on course to become the most subscribed channel on YouTube and is about to pass the controversial personality PewDiePie. - Out of nowhere comes this channel, T-Series. They're at like 60 million subscribers
and their channel is going insane. And I'm thinking, who are these guys? What is T-Series? T-Series is like India's Disney, almost synonymous with the films and music it produces, like the viral song Lahore by Guru Ram Vah. T-Series is, I guess, everywhere. Every part of the country there is T-Series. This is Indian YouTuber Kari Manati, who has 5.5 million subscribers.
YouTube came in India very late. Before YouTube, we had CDs, DVDs, we had VHS, we had cassettes. Every Bollywood movie has a song in it. Of course. So most of them were released by T-Series. I think it's been there forever. Forever coming from a YouTuber who knows his way around the entertainment industry. Okay, so I've been doing this for a long time. It's been like 10 years, I guess, now. And how old are you? I'm 19.
Gulshan Kumar, son of a juice seller, started what became T-Series in 1983, growing it into what's now the ubiquitous emblem of Indian pop culture.
And so it remains, though Kumar was murdered by the Mumbai underworld in 1997.
Today, the company distributes Bollywood, Bhangra, and hip-hop in a variety of Indian languages, all of which is available on a YouTube channel, the subscribership of which has sometimes briefly even overtaken PewDiePie's. We're failing! Another YouTube channel is taking over! That's right, in no less than in November this year. PewDiePie will not be the biggest channel on YouTube!
No! We must fight back! YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat were flooded with PewDiePie's calls to action. I want to put "Subscribe to PewDiePie" on the largest billboard in Times Square. In this video, I will say "PewDiePie" 100,000 times to stop T-Series. People around the world doing campaign for PewDiePie. And in Bangladesh,
It's not different. People, they're sticking posters on the trees and the walls. I am going to destroy my body with a subscribe to PewDiePie tattoo. Everyone doing their part. Have you been doing your part? They've taken control of printers around the world to create posters supporting the blogger.
Pew-die-pie. The other day, I was sitting at work, and the printer started printing something. While 23-year-old Sarah Moore was working her job at a hair salon in Wilson, North Carolina, the office printer, one of 50,000 hacked worldwide, spat out posters promoting PewDiePie. It was honestly one of the best things that's ever happened, because I never thought it would actually come to my...
salon that I work at and everything. Basically, I've always been a fan of PewDiePie, like forever. So what does the war represent to you? The Wall Street Journal and like these other publications, basically, they're just taking things completely out of context. And to rise up and like defend him, I guess, and like have this battle for him, it kind of to me represents that YouTube still has this really like nice deep-seated community of people who know what's right and what's wrong. And we live in a world where cancel culture is so strong. So
somebody does one thing wrong and then you want to cancel them forever.
Sarah disavows the anti-Semitic joke video, but believes his apologies are genuine, and her fear of cancel culture is shared widely on the platform. To many of his fans, PewDiePie is the David up against YouTube the Goliath, against the media Goliath, against the T-Series Goliath. While everyone else is just moaning and complaining and turning our beloved T-Series into a tyrant?
into this big music industry typhoon that's coming in and taking away the little guy, which don't get me wrong, definitely, definitely is all those things. But it's our evil corporation, okay? For once, our evil corporation gets to win and gets to take the number one spot. Canadian Indian YouTuber, Jess Rain. Because maybe it is our time now.
Maybe your karma of colonizing us is finally catching up through us beating you, a completely unnecessarily racially motivated subscriber race on YouTube. Meanwhile, the diss track Bitch Lasagna, with over 100 million views, is PewDiePie's most popular video. The song takes its title from a meme ridiculing the broken English of Indians online.
Other YouTubers like Ethan Klein of H3H3 Productions have fanned the flames.
These mothers have like 1.4 billion people in India. They are churning out YouTube views in unprecedented numbers. Bollywood is the corniest on the history of the earth. And aren't all Indians the goofiest people you've ever met in your life? No, I'm kidding. That was a joke. In response to PewDiePie, Ethan Klein, and the waves of anti-Indian hate on social media, Kari Minati made his own diss track in Hindi to capture how Indians are processing the feud.
I've seen a lot of comments that say that PewDiePie did it as a joke and I've seen a lot of comments that say PewDiePie did not do this as a joke and they are offended and they are angry and they're showing a bit of a rage.
That means the world unites against our nation. Because a lot of people are saying that it's not just PewDiePie vs T-Series, India is alone in this. In an effort to defuse the vitriol unleashed by the subscriber war, PewDiePie asked his fans to support a charity for Indian children.
Clay Shirky says the aggression exhibited by his most vocal fans suggests that for these guys, racism is the principal fuel. He does offer lowercase w, lowercase s white supremacy. What is that? He is in that mode of white guy gamer for whom he exemplifies a kind of freedom to be caustic and insulting without consequence.
And that is something that has been given to white men more than to other members of society. And to hear that people who like Bhangra and Bollywood music are going to displace him does in fact raise those cultural anxieties. Do we want an American in the top YouTube spot or do we want an Indian man?
Succeeding better on a platform that us Americans created. Former Gateway pundit White House correspondent Lucian Wintrich at the right-wing American Priorities Conference in D.C.,
The neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer, with tongue firmly in cheek, called PewDiePie the true leader of all racists, anti-Semites, and fascists, hoping no doubt to entice a few of his terminally ironic viewers while inciting hysterics in the mainstream press.
And PewDiePie's also gotten the nod from Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, who depicts PC culture and left-wing politics as mortal threats to Western civilization. Hey Jordan, what are you doing right now? I'm subscribing to PewDiePie. What everyone has learned.
on all sides of the political spectrum now, is how to take an isolated event in the world and add it to the giant referendum on everything that we're currently living through. Even if PewDiePie doesn't mean it, especially if he doesn't mean it, because he's saying that if you don't mean it, it's kind of okay. It's just a prank. Oh, it's just a prank. Don't you lie, Inkspro. I guess you don't like pranked.
Meanwhile, in the war for subscribers, the Internet's Swedish emperor still claims the prize. But his grasp is increasingly shaky. Smartphone penetration in India is less than 25 percent, which is to say the West has topped out. There will be incremental growth only. When India has tripled the number of people online that it has now, something that's not possible in the U.S. or Europe yet,
T-Series will leave PewDiePie well behind. This is kind of John Henry and the machine, right? There's this last-ditch attempt by PewDiePie's fans to kind of create fake demand to push him over the 80 million mark, which they've done, 80 million subscribers. But a lot of that's people's second email addresses or people doing it as a joke. Like, his view counts aren't going up as fast as his subscriber counts. This is not an audience anymore. But it's not even a competition because the T-Series people don't care. We asked
Louis, media analyst and the 11-year-old son of our executive producer Katya Rogers, to offer some perspective from middle school. Louis says that subscribing to PewDiePie is more meme than anything else. In fact, he sees the current competition as merely a temporary reprieve for a brand that was already losing its luster. Some people, I could see them listening to one sentence of PewDiePie and just hating him.
thinking he's so racist, and he is a lot. Also, sometimes I could see him just doing it to get more views, just to get money.
I don't feel like he's actually really trying for good content. So no one really watches his videos. If they subscribe to PewDiePie, they just press subscribe, leave his channel. But I still got paid anyway. But I still got paid anyway. Right after this whole PewDiePie prestige series thing, he's going to be gone. No one's going to care about him. But I still got paid anyway. Yeah, PewDiePie. Yeah, PewDiePie. Yeah, but I still got paid.
Very prescient, Louis. PewDiePie is still around and still making videos. But with just 111 million subscribers, he's no longer a contender for number one. Thanks for listening to the Midweek Podcast. On this week's big show, I'm speaking with The Onion's new CEO, Brooks Back, and she'll be discussing psyops, real and fake, and the
And in the meantime, you can keep up with the show by following us on Instagram and X. See you Friday. I'm Michael Lohengrin. You come to the New Yorker Radio Hour for conversations that go deeper with people you really want to hear from, whether it's Bruce Springsteen or Questlove or Olivia Rodrigo, Liz Cheney, or the godfather of artificial intelligence, Jeffrey Hinton, or some of my extraordinarily well-informed colleagues at The New Yorker.
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