Why Science and Education Videos Are Thriving on YouTube

Cleo Abram went to Antarctica to discover the secrets lying beneath the ice. And she brought her millions of followers with her. The video journalist trekked down into the ice to show her “Huge, If True” audience a body of water that could contain living organisms, a discovery previously made by a team of Soviet scientists, and that had been sealed off from the rest of the world for 15 million years. The expedition became two videos, each less than 20 minutes long, packed with graphics, expert interviews and firsthand discoveries — the kind of highly produced science programming that once would have been at home on a network like National Geographic or Discovery. On YouTube, her videos garnered more than 6 million views each for her more than 12 million followers across platforms. Abram’s journey to Antarctica is emblematic of a much larger shift in how audiences consume science and educational content. YouTube, which helped make viral science experiments like the Diet Coke and Mentos geyser a cultural phenomenon in the platform’s early years, has evolved into a home for sophisticated STEM programming that can attract audiences in the tens of millions. They’re the type of programs traditional media companies used to produce, but now individual creators have taken the baton. “There are way more creative, entrepreneurial, ambitious human beings than were ever going to be greenlit at any specific streamer, and that’s awesome,” Abram, the self-proclaimed optimist, told TheWrap. The top STEM creators now outpace several of the creator-led institutions Hollywood has embraced in recent years. Mark Rober’s channel has more than 80 million subscribers, while explainer-focused creators including Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell, Vsauce and Veritasium each have more than 20 million. Those numbers, perhaps surprisingly to some, dwarf many of the more entertainment-focused creator celebs like Brittany Broski (2.6 million YouTube subscribers) or Jake Shane (361,000 YT subscribers). These videos can range from splashy, multimillion-view experiments to deeply reported explainers, but they share a common premise: science does not have to be dumbed down to become mass entertainment. Traditional entertainment players have taken note. Netflix, for example, has licensed programs including Emily Calandrelli’s “Emily’s Wonder Lab” and Rober’s “CrunchLabs.” But much of the STEM boom has happened outside the traditional entertainment ecosystem, giving creators the freedom to determine what audiences want before Hollywood ever has a chance to greenlight it. “What we’re seeing is a real curiosity about the world,” Abram said. “I think it says something really great that people are this curious and this eager to learn, and they’re finding it on YouTube.” On YouTube, the boundaries between education and entertainment have become considerably less rigid. Audiences can spend 20 minutes learning about quantum computing, watch a 60-second explainer about a scientific discovery or spend two hours following a creator down a rabbit hole about a subject they never knew they were interested in. These channels vary in terms of production. Some creators engage audiences with splashy experiments – like Mark Rober’s recent video “I Engineered the Perfect First Date” – while others keep the production to a minimum and rely on the science to speak for itself. Rober, an engineer by trade who worked at NASA before his YouTube career took off, has expanded his engaged following from experimental YouTube videos to franchising opportunities with his DIY toy brand CrunchLabs and, most recently, his non-profit class curriculum. The creator partnered with YouTube, NASA and the National Science Teaching Association to develop Class CrunchLabs curriculum for students Grades 3-8. Whether it is being used in a classroom to teach organic chemistry or simply giving a curious viewer a reason to learn about the world, the success of these channels suggests that STEM may be less of a niche than Hollywood once assumed — and marks a changing of the guard of sorts over two decades after “MythBusters” blended science with entertainment to ratings success. Finding success in the niche The appeal of STEM content on YouTube runs counter to the conventional wisdom of mass entertainment. The assumption for creators was that in order to reach the largest possible audience, they would need to make their subject matter as broadly accessible as possible, according to Kevin Allocca, global director of Culture & Trends at YouTube. Instead, some of YouTube’s most successful educational creators discovered the opposite: going deeper actually made the journey more compelling. “One of the things that turned out to be true pretty early is that actually some of the creators who found themselves becoming very successful were people who were going super deep and like intense on stuff,” Allocca told TheWrap. “The ability for an expert to really take you on a guided journey through some pretty dense information is something that I think turned out to have a much larger appeal than anyone would have necessarily realized.” STEM content on YouTube extends beyond classroom-level learning. Many creators spend 30 minutes to two hours on a subject that may not even be a learning target for the traditional classroom. Take Neil deGrasse Tyson for example. His series “StarTalk” sees the astrophysicist and Hayden Planetarium director discuss everything from the periodic table to the anatomy of the sun. He does so at varying degrees of difficulty with in-depth discussions with fellow scientists as well as interviews with traditional celebrities, including Emily Blunt and Hasan Minhaj. His series allows the Hollywood talent to ask him their own “cosmic questions.” For Abram, she holds her content to a certain standard that her audience expects. “Everything that we make, whether it’s 60 seconds or a long-form video, there’s a very high quality bar,” she said. “It has to be rigorous science journalism, it has to be genuinely optimistic and it has to be visually stunning.” That philosophy helps explain why STEM creators can feel less like traditional influencers and more like independent television producers. They are not simply translating information into social media clips; they are developing a distinct programming language around their expertise. And audiences are loving it. “By far the most gratifying thing about making this show is realizing that I had this thing that I wanted, this itch that I needed to scratch, this like way of understanding the world, and it turns out that hundreds of millions of people feel the same way,” Abram shared. How YouTube became a new PBS YouTube has stripped creators of the boundaries put in place by the traditional television model to fit into a particular network, schedule or audience expectation. Now, creators have complete creative control, allowing audiences to splinter off and find who they mesh with best. This is not just true for STEM, but for creators across genres — Kareem Rahma earned an Emmy nomination for his digital series “SubwayTakes,” a first for YouTube. This independence is particularly effective with science content as the splashy experimental nature often works well with the click-baity titles and thumbnails that YouTube’s algorithm adores. “Learning is inherently an interactive exercise … and part of the reason that it has worked so well on YouTube is that YouTube is inherently an interactive platform,” Allocca said. “The ability to explore your curiosities in things is kind of what the platform is designed for.” The platform’s algorithm is built for audiences’ interests to guide them to the next video, with suggested content populating beside the main program as they watch. Creators can point to related content in the description of their video and even embed videos directly for users to click to next. Rather than passively waiting for a programmer to determine what comes next, creators have control of guiding audiences and shaping their curiosities. Abram’s own programming is deliberately divided by subject and format rather than forcing every idea into a single standardized runtime. There is no requirement that an astrophysics explainer from Hank Green fit into a televised 22-minute slot. There is no need to stretch a small idea into a half-hour episode or condense a complicated one into a predetermined runtime. That makes YouTube something of a new-generation PBS — not because it replicates public television’s programming model, but because it has created a massive home for programming built around curiosity and learning without requiring a traditional gatekeeper to commission it. For Hollywood, that is perhaps the most important lesson. The audience for educational programming isn’t necessarily small. The challenge has historically been finding the right format, talent and distribution model to reach it. Creators expand into the classroom Mark Rober has a trick for getting kids to learn about invisible electromagnetic waves: Put a watermelon inside an MRI machine, hand him a 10-pound hammer and tell him to summon “the power of Thor.” That philosophy — learned from years of making some of YouTube’s most-watched science videos — has now become the foundation of Rober’s biggest educational experiment yet: a $55 million nonprofit science curriculum for students in third through eighth grade that will be available free to teachers. The curriculum, which is being developed through Rober’s Class CrunchLabs initiative, will include 40 units and meet National Science Teaching Association standards. The goal isn’t simply to bring Rober’s existing YouTube videos into classrooms, but to apply the storytelling techniques that made those videos successful to the standards teachers need for their curriculum. “We decided we would take all the learnings from YouTube of how do you develop a really, really interesting and engaging story where Mark shows the wow and then explains the how by hiding the vegetables — how can we apply that to what we actually need to execute against the standard?” Tara Graham, the executive director of Class CrunchLabs & CrunchLabs.org Foundation, told TheWrap. The YouTube hook is baked into the curriculum. Before deciding how to introduce a lesson, the team asked Rober and his content team how they would title the unit like a YouTube video. “Something that’s clickable,” Graham said. “We send options to classrooms, and we have the students vote on what hook they are most interested in.” The team said that in less than five months of a “silent build mode,” teachers and parents from all 50 states and 146 countries had signed up for the program without a major promotional push. Graham, who has worked across the education nonprofit sector, said she has never seen numbers like this. Before the class curriculum began, there was already evidence that Rober’s content resonated in the classroom. A 2024 WestEd study found that 28% of teachers surveyed said they were already using Mark Rober and CrunchLabs YouTube videos in their classrooms, despite the videos not being designed around a curriculum or educational standard. “We’re on a mission to reach as many brains as possible, and YouTube is a platform with extraordinary reach,” Graham said. “It has the algorithm to reach as many brains all over the world.” Like so many other creators like Ms. Rachel or MrBeast, Rober has also expanded his brand beyond video into product — in his case, through CrunchLabs’ subscription toy service, which gives children hands-on projects they can complete alongside his experiments. That kind of expansion illustrates the broader opportunity for YouTube-native creators. A successful STEM channel isn’t necessarily just a collection of videos; it can become a brand, educational platform, physical product line or larger entertainment franchise. For “Huge, If True” creator Abram, expansion into traditional entertainment platforms comes with a caveat. The creative control that allowed the series to exist in the first place can’t be lost. As more YouTube-native creators move into streaming, television and other traditional media businesses, Allocca believes the industry will increasingly have to treat them as producers rather than simply on-camera talent. And with followings as big as these, who could say no?