Featured Image Credit: Steve Granitz / Contributor / Prodip Guha / Contributor / Getty
Web veterans of a certain age may well remember a long-running battle at the top of the YouTube charts between Swedish streamer PewDiePie and Indian music video channel T-Series as they both vied for the top spot for overall subscribers.
T-Series eventually won that fight, and held the top spot for around five years, but it's just been dethroned at last by YouTube giant MrBeast, whose channel now sits on a staggering 269 million subscribers.
That makes him the undisputed leader for now, and apparently came about after a one-day spike of two million new subscribers for the video star, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson.
Unsurprisingly, the moment has been marked by a post on X (formerly Twitter) from Donaldson, in which he joked: "After 6 years we have finally avenged Pewdiepie".
After 6 years we have finally avenged Pewdiepie 🥹 pic.twitter.com/V1znbyqw27
— MrBeast (@MrBeast) June 2, 2024
MrBeast's YouTube empire has been years in the making, but it's no great surprise to see him finally crowned as the owner of the single biggest channel.
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His videos are often on scales that other channels can't get anywhere near, from the time he recreated the challenges from Squid Game almost perfectly (long before Netflix got around to making its own reality TV version) to his regular giveaways of huge bundles of cash.
They're also impressively inventive, often requiring people to compete in surprisingly devious challenges to earn massive sums.
He recently saw whether two strangers could live together in a featureless room for 100 days to win a massive prize each - that's become a typically imaginative sort of idea for his channel.
Forbes estimated MrBeast's personal net worth at around $500m back in 2022, and it's safe to say that his rise has continued since then, so it's easy to imagine that he might be worth a good chunk more now.
Still, part of the relative charm of his output is that it's pretty personable and grounded, even if he and his friends are now almost unbelievably wealthy as a result of all their success.
This only accounts for one of MrBeast's channels, too - he also runs a variety of others.
These include channels dedicated to reuploading his main content with professional dubbing into different languages, as part of an effort to make his content more accessible to global audiences.
The nature of these YouTube charts, though, does mean that this could all change again soon - T-Series might well mount a charge and retake the top position at some point, so keep an eye out.
