Three Small 3D Printing Channels, and What Their Numbers Say

Every list of 3D printing YouTubers has the same ten names on it. They are good channels. They also have hundreds of thousands of subscribers and do not need the help.

These three do. All of them are under 15,000 subscribers, all of them posted in the last week, and none of them showed up in any roundup I could find.

I also looked at something those roundups never mention: how many people actually watch. Subscriber count tells you how big an audience a creator has collected. Median views tell you how many show up. Those two numbers are often nothing alike, and the gap says more about a channel than either number alone.

One note on method, because it turns out to matter a great deal. Throughout this piece, "median" means the median of a channel's videos longer than three minutes, excluding anything published in the last thirty days. Shorts and long-form videos are different animals with different audiences, and averaging them together produces a number that describes neither. A video posted last week has not finished collecting its views. Both of those mistakes are in the first version of this article, and there is a correction at the bottom explaining what they cost.

BitBox Props — 2,940 subscribers

He builds weapons from video games. The Gravity Gun from Half-Life 2. The Flak Cannon from Unreal Tournament '99. The Railgun from Quake 3. Three days ago he finished a BFG 9000 and, because it is a BFG, made it run Doom.

Ten videos total. Every one of them is a build, and every one of them is finished — no teasers, no "part one of six."

The number: his median video gets 17,080 views against 2,940 subscribers. That is 5.8 times his subscriber base, on a typical video. His Gravity Gun build did 35,119.

A channel this small reaching that far means the videos are travelling on their own, to people who have never heard of him. That is the rarest thing on this list, and it is the strongest number of the three by a wide margin.

Made by Jade — 2,890 subscribers

Functional prints. A monitor light bar she built instead of buying one. Desk organisers that actually get used. An LED sign that turned out to be the most-watched thing she has made, at 93,624 views.

Fourteen videos, and the pattern in them is consistent: she shows a finished object, explains why she made it instead of buying it, and moves on.

The number: median 3,177 views against 2,890 subscribers — 1.1 times her audience. Small, but on the right side of one, which means every video is finding people beyond the ones already subscribed.

Worth noting because it is unusual: almost the same subscriber count as BitBox Props, a completely different reach profile, and both are healthy. There is more than one way for a small channel to work.

RisingApe — 14,400 subscribers

James, out of the UK. The channel is print, paint and create — printer reviews sit next to miniature painting and the occasional oversized project, which is a combination you do not see often.

The reviews are the most opinionated I found. "The Bambu Lab X2D is NOT a No-Brainer purchase." "The Best Resin Printer… BUT not for you." "Nobody Agrees on the Future of 3D Printing."

He also covers hardware nobody else bothers with — Sovol, TOOCAA, Anycubic's odder machines — which is genuinely useful if you are shopping below the price of a Bambu.

The number: median 5,780 views against 14,400 subscribers — 0.4 times his audience. His X2D review did 51,272, about nine times his median.

The other thing his catalogue shows is a clean split. Across 128 videos, his Shorts sit at a median of 788 and his long-form at 5,780. Those are not the same channel wearing two hats; they are two different-sized crowds, and only one of them is the audience the subscriber count is describing.

The reviews are where the reach is. When this guy has a position to argue rather than a product to report on, a lot more people turn up to hear it.

What the three of them show together

Three channels in the same hobby, and three completely different relationships between audience and reach. One reaches nearly six times the people who follow him. One reaches about the same number. One reaches under half — and then, on the videos where he takes a side, nine times that.

None of that is visible from a subscriber count, which is the only number these lists ever print.

If you print things, subscribe to all three. They are small enough that it matters.

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Correction, 25 August 2026. The first version of this piece gave RisingApe a median of 1,491 views and BitBox Props a median of 13,542. Both were wrong.

James at RisingApe wrote to say the numbers looked off to him, and he was right. The figure I used mixed his Shorts in with his long-form videos and leaned on uploads too recent to have finished collecting views. Recomputed across his full catalogue of 128 videos, his median is 5,780 rather than 1,491 — which also turns his X2D review from thirty-four times his median into nine, and his reach ratio from a tenth of his audience into four tenths. Forty-one of his videos beat the number I originally published by five times or more. A median that a third of the catalogue clears five times over is not a median anyone should have printed.

The BitBox Props figure was a separate and worse error, and entirely mine: 13,542 was not a median at all. It sits within a rounding error of the view count on his most recent upload, which is what I appear to have taken it from. His actual median is 17,080 — higher than what I published, so the mistake understated him.

Made by Jade's number was correct and is unchanged.

Every figure above is now computed the same way, stated at the top, and I have left the original numbers visible in this note rather than quietly swapping them out. Thanks to James for pushing back instead of deleting the email.