Succeeding at the YouTube Science Communication Game

The YouTube science communication channel Risk Bites has just hit a major milestone – but is the platform still an effective place for scientists to engage with broader audiences?

Little time, no talent, and one of the top YouTube videos on nanotechnology – which just goes to show that it’s surprising what broader impact academics can achieve when they put their mind to it!

Twelve years ago, I set out on a journey to see whether a full blown academic with limited time and even less talent could use YouTube as an effective platform to connect understanding and insights to a general audience.

Just a few days ago, the resulting YouTube channel — Risk Bites — hit a major milestone as one of its videos topped a million views.¹

This is still pitifully low compared to today’s professional YouTube superstars. But for most academics — myself included — it represents a hugely significant translation of knowledge into resources that are widely (and freely) accessible and impactful; even more so when you realize that there’s nothing to stop most academics leveraging YouTube in a similar way.²

For over two decades now my work has focused heavily on how to make knowledge and insights that are often locked within the “ivory tower” of academia as widely accessible and useful as possible. I believe rather strongly that the privilege of academic scholarship and research comes with an obligation to ensure that the knowledge we unearth is accessible to anyone who can benefit from it, no matter who they are or where they are. And until 2012 this largely meant me focusing on my writing, speaking, and working with journalists.

This all changed when my kids started getting more involved with YouTube, and my daughter in particular started to flex her muscles as an accomplished content creator.

While YouTube had been around since 2005, it took my children to show me what was possible, and what early YouTube science communicators like Hank Green, Derek Muller and Henry Reich were achieving.

The opportunities the platform seemed to offer for connecting expertise with broad audiences was compelling. But I had a problem — two actually: I had precious little time as a professor at (then) the University of Michigan, and I had no talent to speak of when it came to making videos!

Not to be deterred, we decided to launch an experiment from the University of Michigan’s Risk Science Center (which I was director of at the time) that leant into my limitations.

And the result was the YouTube channel Risk Bites.

I moved on from posting regular videos on the channel a few years back as the focus of my work changed, but at its peak the channel was reasonably successful for something created between the cracks by an academic. A few years after our launch we were typically getting over 1,000 views and over 50 hours of view-time per day.

But YouTube is a communication gift that keeps on giving, and so while I haven’t posted any new content in a while, the views continue. As of writing, the channel has had over 5 million views across its lifetime, and the equivalent of nearly 20 years’ worth of view time!

But the milestone that triggered this reflection came from a video that we posted in July 2016 as a primer on nanotechnology:

This video has currently had over one million views, and has been watched for nearly 35,000 hours in aggregate. But what makes this all the more impressive is that it’s a scrappy video that relies on poorly drawn stick figures on an office whiteboard.

No high level production team, no marketing budget, no multi thousand dollar photo shoot — just me with a whiteboard and dry erase marker grabbing a few hours between the cracks in a busy schedule.

Of course, not every video on the channel has been as successful. One of the worst performing videos on the channel is a 2018 video on the safety of self-driving cars, which has only had 900 views up to now! And the last video we posted on risk and AI — which I expected to be well received — is struggling at just under 4,000 views:

Yet despite these disappointments, it’s encouraging to see that scrappy videos conveying solid ideas can still get traction on the platform.

Reflecting this, I ran a workshop for grad students several years ago on how to create Risk Bites-style videos. It’s a little dated as technology has moved on, but it’s still useful enough I think that I’ve just brushed off the modules we used for the workshop and posted them on andrewmaynard.net.³

If nothing else, these modules provide insights into the process that was used to create a video that may just have had more impact than all of my formal classes combined,⁴ and that certainly show that YouTube is still a powerful platform for connecting broad audiences with complex topics — even if you have little time and no talent!⁵

1. To save you the suspense of reading further to see which video this is, it’s “What is Nanotechnology”, published July 18 2016. The video was actually whipped up for a school teacher I was working with who suddenly realized — at the very last minute — she needed something to show for a placement with a team working on nanotech at ASU!

2. I link to this later in the article, but you can access a series of modules tow to cerate Risk Bites-like videos here.

3. In 2020 I published a more formal paper on the process used to create Risk Bites videos, and the importance of YouTube as a platform for academics to use in reaching broader audiences with their work.

4. This is probably not true — especially as the metrics of success and impact are very different for a formal class compared to a YouTube video. But those viewing numbers do make you think!

5. I guess I should come clean here and admit that the “no talent” is a little tongue in cheek. I certainly can’t draw, but I do know how to tell a story and connect broad audiences with complex ideas. And as it turns out, this is extremely important when creating effective videos.