So yeah…I hit 5000 subscribers this week on YouTube.  It only took me about fourteen years to get there.

ThruMyLens started on June 9, 2010 – “blog” sites were all the rage in 2010.  I really wasn’t looking to start an online diary when I started ThruMyLens.  At the time, I had three other websites all dedicated to luxury wristwatches, including one of the largest online watch enthusiast communities called WATCH TALK FORUMS (remember discussion forums?).  From a business standpoint, it made sense for me to focus on watches.  But creatively, I craved photographing and writing about other things.  The last thing I wanted was another online niche that creatively boxed me in to creating content about one single topic – like watches.  ThruMyLens was born out of this need to have a creative outlet to examine other topics of interests – cameras, travel, firearms, mobile phones, computers – you name it.  The companion ThruMyLens YouTube site didn’t come along until March of 2012 – shortly after I sold WATCH TALK FORUMS.  With that site sold, I now had the free time to devote to ThruMyLens and decided I wanted to create more videos to supplement the content on the ThruMyLens website.  I never set out to become a YouTube star or “influencer.”  The idea always was that the videos would drive traffic to the website.  The video supplements would provide a surface level topic discussion, but the real “meat and potatoes” details would be found in the written photo review.  So I did none of the things you would do in order to grow a YouTube channel.  Much like my website, I published sporadically and on a myriad of topics.  For example, when I was doing a lot of competitive shooting, I’d publish firearms reviews, match video, tutorials…and then YouTube decided that guns and gun content was bad.  So I started collecting more knives, and started posting knife content for a while.  It was during this time in 2020 that the ThruMyLens YouTube channel hit 2500 subscribers.  So it took 8 years of essentially flailing about with little focus or direction to get to 2500 subscribers.  From about 2020 until 2024 I posted very sporadically to my YouTube channel – maybe six videos a year on average.  I picked up the pace a bit in 2024 and posted nearly 12 videos that year.

Then in January of 2025 out of the blue, YouTube decided to monetize my channel.  I had about 4500 subscribers at the time.  So the growth was a little better from 2020-2025 than from 2012 to 2020.  It took me eight years to get to 2500 subscribers, but the next 2000 subs came in five years.  Funny thing about getting monetized – it motivated me to post more on YouTube.  I decided to see if I could post videos to my YouTube channel weekly.

For the past year and a half, I’ve been pretty steadily posting once a week.  My YouTube revenue has been (ever so slowly) growing, but so too has my subscriber count.  Once I started posting weekly subscriber count started accelerating during 2025, and did so at an even more rapid pace in 2026:

2025 Subscriber Growth

YTD 2026 Subscriber Growth

Unfortunately, Subscriber count ain’t what it used to be in terms of a meaningful metric, but it’s still pretty meaningful.  I have a friend who has a channel much like my own in that it’s not topic specific – he has just over 36,000 subscribers.  But the views he gets on many if not most of his videos hover in the same range mine do.  He struggles to get greater than 1000 views on most of his videos for the first several weeks/months.  But occasionally he gets a video that will get between 1k and 3k views in the first few weeks.  And he gets a few that climb to 10k views and above.  His concentration of videos with great than 1000 views is higher than my own.  In the past year, two of my best performing videos were both about Apple products (because…Apple).  And my R5 Mark II vs. R6 Mark III has done extremely well, currently sitting at 6,400 views.  None of the videos I’ve published in the last two years have hit 10,000 views.  But I continue to try and refine production quality, title choices, thumbnails, and even topic choices to hopefully keep things heading in the right direction.  For now, I’ll take hitting 5,000 subscribers as a win.  Swing by and give me a sub!