PewDiePie is inching ever closer to that 100 million subscribers mark. Currently, he’s the second most subscribed YouTube channel; the first is T-Series with 100 million. PewDiePie isn’t far off that mark with over 98 million subscribers.
The next milestone for the Swedish YouTuber, Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg, is 100 million subscribers. And quite the milestone that is. While he won’t be the first one, that honor went to T-Series, he is still roughly 40 million above the nearest competitor, 5 Minute Crafts. With a 40 million subscriber gap, it’s not much of a competition. After a brief competition between PewDiePie and T-Series to reach that mark, the question remains, when will Felix get 100 million subscribers? He’s very close as it is.
Dextero asked the same question. That said, their numbers are slightly different than what I got (spoiler!). We’ll cover why that maybe later.
Time to Crunch Some Numbers
As of August 2, 2019, and in the late morning when I gathered a pen and paper to do the calculations, PewDiePie has 98,476,017 subscribers on YouTube. In the time it took me to write the first two paragraphs, that number has already jumped a couple thousand. Still, that’s our base number. With that as our starting point, he has 1,523,983 subscribers remaining to reach his goal.
Thanks to some numbers from Trackalytics, we know that PewDiePie gained 1,400,924 subscribers from July 1 to July 31. That is an average of 45,191 subscribers per day.
Now we need to find the days needed to reach 100 million. To do that, we divide the remaining subscribers required, by our average per day in July and we have 33.7, rounded up to 34 days.
Thirty-four days from now gives us an estimate of Thursday, September 5, 2019.
Numbers Wrap Up
I know those numbers were painful to look at, but I wanted to make sure I showed my work. You can see what kind of student I was here. Anyway, I mentioned above that Dextero reached a similar conclusion. It’s fair to say that we’re close, within a day of each other. There are a couple of reasons as to why that is.
The first may be their base number. While writing this, PewDiePie’s subscriber count jumped by nearly a thousand. It is an average and estimate after all.
The second may be that in their article, Dextero mentions using the average from the last 14 days. Our numbers there are very similar, so it’s a valid number to pick. I, instead, selected from all of July, giving me an average from the last 31 days.
Either way, it looks like our results are very close, and it could be merely a matter of rounding up or down to reach the same day.
Data Disclaimer
The issue with this is that viewership can jump. Just looking at the subscriber count from the last summer is notably higher than the trends from the previous months. This is possibly a result of the competition between PewDiePie and T-Series, encouraging viewers to subscribe in their race. It also could be content-related. PewDiePie’s Minecraft series is doing exceptionally well, even sparking a return to Minecraft from other YouTubers and streamers.
Minecraft’s popularity and nostalgia draw a large audience, from younger gamers to seasoned players. It’s no surprise that a surge in subscribers could be the result of the game’s popularity.
It’s difficult to predict if the current average will continue. July’s average increase in subscribers is more than double that of June’s, which sits at 21 thousand per day. If the trend continues, then PewDiePie will reach 100 million by the estimated September 5.
