If I pay to advertise myself or my company on YouTube is YouTube corrupt for publishing the ad? Same goes for this. It’s a book of advertisements for the most part and iirc they even have a service for companies to break a record. It’s not some tome of truth and should not be viewed as such.

It’s literally the point of Guinness lmao. It doesn’t make much money off book sales or some standard of integrity but from people who pay them to put them in the book. You can expedite the procedure massively by paying and it’s by design. This isn’t corruption.

Another thing to think about is these figures are worldwide. It doesn’t represent the mainstream of every country. For example t series is an Indian company and is unknown everywhere else.