PewDiePie weighs in on Ninja vs Jacksepticeye YouTube subscriber battle

The world’s biggest YouTuber, Felix ‘PewDiePie’ Kjellberg, has given his thoughts on the subscriber ‘battle’ between Twitch star Tyler ‘Ninja’ Blevins and YouTube heavyweight Sean ‘Jacksepticeye’ McLoughlin.

Since the release of Fortnite in July 2017, and the global interest in Epic Games‘ free-to-play battle royale mode, Ninja has seen his social following grow exponentially, to the point where he was the most subscribed to Twitch streamer ever, with an incredible 269,000 subscribers.

According to statistics provided by social media monitoring site SocialBlade, in August 2016 Ninja acquired 432 new YouTube subscribers, compared to the 3.48 million he acquired over March 2018.

Ninja has recently been streaming from various European countries, such as Austria and Poland.

The rapid growth of Ninja’s YouTube channel contrasts to that of Jackspeticeye, who has been a staple name on the online video platform for upwards of 10 years, uploading over 4,000 videos since his channel was created in 2007.

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Ninja had been closing in on Jacksepticeye’s sub-count for a while, and it appears he’s finally overtaken the Irish gamer. As of 3:00pm GMT on March 10, Ninja sits at 21,681,190, while Jacksepticeye sits at 21,676,373, putting the Fortnite superstar at about 5,000 subs ahead.

This prompted PewDiePie to tweet a response, asking “How can this be? That’s impossible”, with a screenshot of the two content creators’ subscriber counts on top of a ‘meme’ of Spiderman crying.

It’s possible that PewDiePie is genuinely surprised by Ninja’s incredible growth, or it could be that the whole thing is something of a parody of PewDiePie’s own, very public subscriber battle with Bollywood label T-Series. 

Jacksepticeye responded humorously, stating that he’s “on my way to the ranch”, in reference to an in-joke between PewDiePie and his subscribers, regarding the popular American talk show ‘Dr. Phil’ – where troublesome children are sent to ‘the ranch’.

PewDiePie sits at over 88,735,000 subscribers on YouTube.

Despite being overtaken by Ninja, it is unlikely Jacksepticeye is unhappy with his subscriber count, given that he remains the 70th most subscribed to YouTube account in the world.

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He is undoubtedly an incredibly popular internet personality, with Twitter users responding to Ninja’s overtake with “feelsbadman” and “how did we allow this to happen”.

Are there any more twists to come in the second most interesting subscriber battle on YouTube at the moment?