It has been pointed out that the official YouTube “Topic” channel for BTS member Jungkook does not appear correctly in search results.
For the past month, searching for “Jungkook” on YouTube has failed to bring up his official channel. While searching for the names of other BTS members leads to their respective individual (Topic) channels, a search for “Jungkook” instead displays videos from “Rekka” channels (channels that aggregate or exploit content for views). Furthermore, because the official topic-based channel does not appear, it is impossible to subscribe to it, a factor that has negatively impacted the growth rate of his subscriber count (which currently stands at 4.4 million).
In fact, if you search for “Jungkook” while including “BTS” (ex: “BTS Jungkook,” “Bangtan Jungkook,” etc.), it redirects you to the official BTS channel. For all other members, such searches lead to their respective individual topic pages.
Big Hit could easily resolve this by requesting a fix from YouTube, yet they’ve left the issue unaddressed for an entire month.
While every other member has their own official channel displayed, only a “clickbait/gossip” channel appears for Jungkook.
Essentially, this has resulted in a situation where streaming and view counts for Jungkook’s solo tracks are effectively being blocked.
1. At this point, it’s obvious to everyone that HYBE is doing this on purposeㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ I remember an interview where Charlie Puth mentioned that when he referred to Jungkook simply as “Jungkook,” HYBE corrected him and told him to say “BTS’s Jungkook”, that really showed me just how much HYBE doesn’t want Jungkook to have a solo careerㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ It’s practically pathological at this point. That’s why I’m 10,000% certain the YouTube “glitch” was intentional, too
2. What is the agency even there for if they can’t handle something like this properly and in a timely manner? Does Jungkook not have an agency? Big Hit is freaking incompetent
3. Knowing Big Hit, I’m sure they were aware of it but chose not to request a correction. It’s not like this is the first time they’ve pulled some shady stuff, it’s happened time and time again
4. Big Hit will always be Big Hit. They are always doing shady things like this
5. This isn’t just a one-time error and they really need to fix it. It’s basically being left unaddressed. It’s so bizarre that they keep crediting the group on Jungkook’s solo tracks. They even did it for “Seven,” and only changed the credits after an article criticizing them came out overseas
6. I’m pretty sure Jungkook from BTS has had the most success as a soloist, are they trying to suppress him so he doesn’t stand out too much on his own? What is going on?
7. Why are they acting like this all of a sudden? Big Hit, do your job
8. Are they doing this on purpose to stir up frustration and rally the fans?ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ They’re a company that’s constantly monitoring fans and analyzing trends in the idol industry, no?
9. At this point, I’m not even surprised anymore
10. My bias went through something similar. Even after moving to a separate agency, the issue persisted, so fans brought it up to the new agency. They ended up trying everything, changing the name of the artist’s personal YouTube channel, re-linking the music streaming data, and more, to get it fixed. They even reached out to Google, but were told it was an “AI issue” on YouTube’s end. I have no idea what that’s even supposed to mean