In 2023, Kurzgesagt will have been around for 10 years, an incredibly long time in internet years. We are one of the largest scientific channels on YouTube, yet still something of a mystery to many people. Therefore, let us take this opportunity to talk about ourselves in three parts: our backstory, how we finance our work and the values of Kurzgesagt.
Our story began when Philipp, our founder, dropped out of high school as a teenager. He had little interest in learning until he encountered a teacher at a school for dropouts who taught differently. She spoke of connections and the big picture, and told stories. For the first time, Philipp was motivated to learn without being forced. Kurzgesagt strives to recreate this experience for viewers.
In 2012, YouTube was less commercial and more idealistic. It was not possible to make a living off videos like ours, but the goal was creative freedom. For the first few years, it cost money to make Kurzgesagt. We had no outside funding and worked long hours for clients during the day and on Kurzgesagt at night.
In 2015, the channel began to break even, and eventually, we decided to hire the first team members and create a legal entity. This allowed us to do more and improve, but also necessitated us earning more money. With no experience in running a company, we had no intention of growing, but it happened anyway.
Today, Kurzgesagt is an animation studio with offices in Munich and Berlin. We need computers, monitors, tablets, desks, coffee, contracts, pay licences, taxes, rent and insurance. Our team consists of over 60 full employees and many freelancers around the world, and salaries alone cost millions of dollars a year.
So, how do we finance Kurzgesagt? Since 2015, our sources of funding have varied depending on opportunities and the state of the world. Early on, agency work was our main source of income, and ad revenue, sponsorships and our shop have all contributed significantly. 62% of our revenue comes directly or indirectly from viewers: they watch our videos with ads, support us on Patreon or buy from our shop.
The shop is the single biggest source of income, accounting for 40% of our revenue over the last 8 years. YouTube ads accounted for 13%, and Patreon for 9%. Without your support, we would cease to exist. We believe in the power of science, reason and humanism.We want to make these values more accessible and show that they can help us create a better future.Our shop and Patreon are our most important sources of revenue, and because we see ourselves as science communicators – we don’t just do merch, but sciency products that we spend hundreds of hours researching, discussing with experts, polishing up and working on directly with the manufacturers. They are part of the science story we try to tell. It also just feels good to get directly funded by you guys and give you something back for it, on top of our videos.
YouTube ads are a crucial part of our funding as well, but they are not within our control. Then there is paid agency work, which we stopped doing in 2022 – it accounted for 9% of our revenue over the last 8 years. A lot in the beginning, not much by the end. Then there are commercial sponsors advertising products -they accounted for 12% of our revenue. We also got about 7% from German Public Broadcasting for the German Channel, but ended this partnership in 2022.
Finally there are institutional sponsors representing about 10%. Some people take issue with this – especially Bill Gates has come under public scrutiny, and we’ve been criticised for even working with organisations funded by him. So let us look at this 10% in more detail: About 3% of our revenue over the last eight years came from the Gates organisations for a wide variety of topics, often suggested by us. 5% comes from Open Philanthropy and is only used for specific projects. With these funds, we have started Arabic, Hindi, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese, and French channels, bringing more free science content to more people. Then there is a two-year funding for original Tik Tok content, which gives us freedom to explore and learn how to do short form science communication. The final 2% came from other organisations like the red cross or the UN for example.
We choose institutional sponsors carefully but if organisations want to fund videos that help us spread quality information about relevant topics, this is an easy yes for us, if we have the capacity for it. On top of that, the institutional sponsors we are working with align with our values. We have contracts with every grant giver or sponsor that bars them from editorial influence, other than suggesting topic areas like “global health” or “climate change”. We agree on video topics together, but sponsors can neither influence details, nor our conclusions. The final decision always remains with us. And usually, we develop the topics of the videos autonomously and tell the sponsor what we are doing afterwards. If you are interested in how we research our videos in detail, our head of research wrote an article about it.
Running an educational youtube channel is a balancing act that we take very seriously. We are doing our best to maintain this balance, adjusting whenever necessary. As a team and company we want to grow to give more people access to a science based outlook on the world.
This brings us to our final topic – why are we doing Kurzgesagt? Our Values and Our Vision Our core mission is to spark curiosity. We want to make science and humanism accessible for as many people as possible. The effort we put into creating our videos is a way of achieving that – our videos are beautiful because that helps to spark curiosity, to understand complex topics, and because it just feels good to create and watch. Our research is as intensive as it is so our videos are a good simplification of very complicated topics. We want to make people excited about science so they rediscover subjects they hated in school and see how amazing they are.
On top of curiosity, we want to inspire long term thinking and a positive, constructive outlook. Being optimistic about the future of humanity is not mainstream and we think this is horrible. Pessimism often sounds smart and gets more views while optimism can sound naive but this is a bias that is not helpful for us as a species.
We believe in the power of science, reason and humanism. We want to make these values more accessible and show that they can help us create a better future. Despite the gloominess of many topics, we want to approach them with informed and well researched optimism - not brushing humanity’s very real challenges aside, but also not falling into the trap of pessimism. We want to inspire you to dream a little about the glorious future that we could actually build - but only if we believe it is possible. In the long run, we don’t only want to do this on Youtube, but also on our Tik Tok channel, in long form content, apps, the VR game that will be released later this year, and the games we plan to make in the future. Our shop is a central part of this vision, where we start our stories with a video and end them with a poster.
We exist because of you and we have no idea how much we appreciate that you are here. If you personally want to help us do this, you can watch and share our videos, check out our shop, become a patreon, or give us an ad blocker exception. And hopefully, we’ll have a lasting impact by making science and learning more fun for as many people as possible.
Doing Kurzgesagt for a decade has been a pretty crazy ride. So from the whole team - thank you so much for being with us all these years.