Finally, the king has abdicated: the problematic Pewdiepie on YouTube is no longer the platform's most subscribed individual streamer. The title is held by Jimmy Donaldson, known to millions of YouTube viewers as MrBeast.

Both MrBeast (open in new tab) and Pewdiepie (open in new tab) maintain huge audience numbers, while Pewds subscriber numbers have been relatively stagnant, according to Social Blade (open in new tab) estimates, It has increased rapidly from 100 million in August to 111 million on November 14. And in the early morning hours of November 15, the number of subscribers to his YouTube page reached 112 million, officially surpassing Pewdiepie.

His rapid subscriber growth is no doubt due in part to his extravagant ways with his audience: for example, he recently gifted a man $500,000 in exchange for living in a grass ring for 100 days (open in new tab), and in August, he celebrated 100 million channel subscribers, His latest video, posted on November 12, was a gift of a private jet (opens in new tab).

These are big-budget productions: in the "Circle of Grass" video, for example, MrBeast gave the contestant an entire house full of supplies to live in, then to make the man's life more miserable (after numerous other bizarre and expensive stunts) demolish the house continued. These videos are fun to watch and are a stark contrast to the style of videos in which Pewdie Pie basically plays games, talks about whatever comes to mind at the time, and occasionally yells.

The addition of MrBeast does not necessarily mean the end of an era, as Pewdiepie remains very popular, but it is hard not to see a shift in the guardians here: while Pewdiepie is a personality, MrBeast is an event: MrBeast is basically a reality show production studio with a big enough budget to convince people to do stupid (i.e., funny) things on camera. It has occasionally gone sideways: in November 2021, for example, he was criticized for spending $3.5 million on a realistic recreation of the Netflix show "Squid Game" (opens in new tab), in which the super-rich prey on the poor.

But on the flip side of the coin, Squid Game has been a tremendous success, and so has MrBeast's video, with over 303.5 million views a year after it was posted. While name recognition obviously plays a large part in its success, there is also the simple fact that MrBeast's work is far more mainstream and accessible than Pewdiepie's offerings. However, he might be willing to look at the $60,000 "Extreme Hide and Seek."

His extravagant ways are well known enough to be mentioned in a recent Scott Says video:

Somewhat surprisingly, Pewdiepie said in August that he was ready to give up his throne. I've been retired for two years now," he said in a Q&A video (opens in new tab), admitting that MrBeast will "definitely" overtake his roster. 'I can't wait for it to be over. He definitely deserves it. I hope he does."

Pewdiepie announced his "retirement" in 2020, but has actually rather slowed down: according to Dexerto (opens in new tab), his subscriber count, which was 107 million at the time, continues to grow as well.