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The Vlogbrothers channel, according to VidStatsX projections, is a month and a half away from hitting one million subscribers. I didn’t really believe this was an achievable goal until late last year, but our channel has continued to grow faster than ever (as have all of our other channels.)

But while subscription numbers used to be my metric of choice for understanding how well a YouTube channel is doing, it seems less interesting to me now. Which, of course, is perfect timing for me to not be as excited as I should be about this milestone. 

What excites me is intelligent discourse in the comments, IRL nerdfighter gatherings, kickass art on Tumblr, great builds in Nerdcrafteria, great threads in Our Pants. 

The growth in subscribers does not seem to correspond to an increase in those things. Lizzie Bennet (with fewer subs and slower growth) has similar levels of engagement to Vlogbrothers. And video views (especially views on new videos) does not seem to be increasing with the number of subscribers. 

This is not something that concerns me, part of me thinks that Nerdfighteria only works when it is a certain size, and it self-limits to that size, but I dunno.

What I do know is, the core of this community is what really interests me. And while I will continue to make videos for a broader audience on Vlogbrothers (because that is a challenge that interests me) what stands out about Nerdfighteria is not it’s size, but it’s passion. And so that, I think, will be the primary goal of John and me as we surpass a million subscribers. 

And, of course, whenever I talk about this community I can’t help but thank it for making my life so very cool and for supporting things like The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, Crash Course, SciShow, and The Brain Scoop. We will continue to do new things like that, and we would never be able to do them without your support (of course, we don’t expect you to support crap, so we do our best to make those projects very good, but I thank you for your support nonetheless.)