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Note: You're focusing on the English speaking sphere, yet e.g. the French EA community owes its existence in no insignificant part to two non-EA YouTubers. A third (very popular) one is soon adding himself to the list.
Note: You're focusing on the English speaking sphere, yet e.g. the French EA community owes its existence in no insignificant part to two non-EA YouTubers. A third (very popular) one is soon adding himself to the list.
Anecdote: I had always watched a lot of YouTube on politics, science, and philosophy, but never encountered the topic of effective altruism until I saw a video from Alex O'Connor, who I had been following for a while.
(Just had a look through his channel and I think it was this video in December 2020)
It immediately made sense to me and sent me on my EA journey. I couldn't believe it was the first time[1] I was hearing about it!
Humane Hancock (who's commented here) was a similarly large influence on me.
YouTube works!
I vaguely remember hearing someone on the radio, probably Will MacAskill, discussing saving a million-pound painting from a burning building rather than a child in ~2014
Great and well-researched post, thanks for writing!
Maybe someone should start an incubator program to help people start EA-aligned YouTube channels.
Ah, thank you!!
At the Unjournal we have a YouTube channel and I'm keen to produce more videos both about our process and the case for our model, and about the content of the research we evaluate and the pivotal questions we consider, which are generally EA-adjacent. This includes explainer videos, making the case videos, interviews/debates, etc.
But as you and most organizations probably realize, it's challenging and very time-consuming to produce high-quality videos, particularly in terms of creating and synchronizing images, sound, and video editing, etc. Without a dedicated communications/media person with time and skills to do this, it's a big ask. I've tried a bit to do this with simple tools like iMovie as you'll see and I've experimented with AI-powered tools like Descript but I haven't found these easy to adopt. Maybe there'll be a rapid improvement coming soon making it much easier.
Anyways I see value in some resource sharing skills and tips and templates for this among EA/aligned organizations; looking for suggestions and links.
Naïve question: Do you know if there is data on YouTube's potential to convert to highly engaged EAs that would not otherwise convert? I think YouTube is worth testing, but if there is little data already I would be interested to see anything on conversion or even proxies for it. I know 80k hrs is rigorous so they probably have some hypothesis it can work out, or maybe they have hard evidence.
I haven't found anything about how much YouTube converts people to highly engaged EAs. I also haven't seen anything about what actually motivates people to be highly engaged in EA either. That said, I did just find this article from 80,000 Hours, which discusses how the organization moved away from ads and sponsorships but started to focus more on making their own videos. As such, it's probably not too unlikely we'll have a good answer from them in the near future.
Nice writeup! Just expanded on this in a post about LLMs surfacing EA content https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8PFpiZZmkH9CgcBaZ/answer-engine-optimisation-what-do-llms-believe-about-impact
That's an interesting approach to trying to improve EA's presence! I really wish more people knew about EA, so I'm glad to see you're helping with that!
In this essay, I argue that improving EA’s presence on YouTube could be a high impact cause area, and I offer a series of ideas on how EA's presence on the platform could be improved.
In the appendix, I share links to the data sets I created while writing this essay, some thoughts on AI safety’s presence on YouTube, and my sources.
As a side note, I am not a YouTuber so this essay is very much an outsider perspective.
In this section, I argue that improving EA’s presence on YouTube could be a high impact cause area using the “scale, neglectedness, tractability” framework. Importantly though, we lack a clear understanding of how much views on YouTube translate into EA community building. As such, this section is somewhat speculative.
YouTube is the world’s third largest video streaming platform with over 2.5 billion monthly users. Despite this, most EAs do not discover EA through YouTube. According to “EA Survey 2024: How People Get Involved in EA,” podcasts, TED talks, and videos constitute less than 12% of the sources where individuals first heard about EA. Instead, most people first hear about EA from people they know, 80,000 Hours, the rationalist community, and text-based mediums. This is a big problem because it means that the EA movement could be missing out on a large source of growth.
EA primarily gets its attention on YouTube from media tours by major EA figures, EA-related videos from non-EA creators, as well as EA-related videos from EA creators. Overall, each of these categories is reasonably neglected:
Overall, I think that improving EA’s presence on YouTube is very tractable. Since there’s very few channels, figures, and content related to EA on YouTube, I suspect EA-related content is far more likely to be successful than content on other topics.
Having argued that EA’s presence on YouTube is high in scale, neglectedness, and tractability, the following are some concrete ideas on how to actually improve EA’s presence on YouTube:
As a side note, I used to include sponsoring existing non-EA channels on this list, but I have removed because 80,000 Hours found it to not be very cost effective.
There are very few channels on YouTube that make content on a wide range of EA-related topics. As such, one is far more likely to be successful making a channel on EA-related topics than other topics on YouTube. In this section, I’ll describe what I think is necessary for a channel to be successful, some specific channel ideas, as well as how neglected various EA-related topics are.
In the EA sphere, there’s a strong correlation between the quality of one’s videos and how many views they regularly get. As such, I think that creating high quality content should be one's primary focus. The following are a list of what I think are the necessary requirements for a successful YouTube channel in 2026:
For more detailed thoughts on how to make a successful YouTube channel, look at this article from Chana Messinger.
The following are a list of ideas for EA-related channels based on what kind of EA channels I think are most likely to be successful:
While writing this essay, I ranked the neglectedness of various EA-related topics by comparing the popularity of their third most popular video on YouTube. This section summarizes that data:
In this section, I make specific recommendations for how 80,000 Hours and Giving What We Can could improve their YouTube channels. This section is really just targeted at these two organizations so you may want to skip this section.
80,000 Hours is the largest YouTube channel of any EA organization that gives career advice. As such, I think that it could do a lot of good by making more EA-related content that targets general audiences while still offering career advice. Specifically, I think that 80,000 Hours should make a new talking head series that covers its career guide as well as continue its series “The World’s Most Pressing Problems.”
GWWC, despite only having 3,000 subscribers, is the largest YouTube channel from an EA charity evaluator. As such, I think their channel can grow significantly if it makes major changes to its content strategy. Specifically, I think that GWWC should:
There are very few videos about the concept of effective altruism, and they are not very popular. When you search YouTube for “effective altruism,” the top two videos have less than a million views, and the third most popular video has less than a hundred thousand. I think that, in general, EA could get a lot more attention if EA-related YouTubers simply made more content directly about the idea itself.
The Future of Life Institute has released a few extinction risk short films that have gotten over a million views, which suggests that films and documentaries related to EA topics could be reasonably successful. In particular, as far as I know, there currently exist no documentaries about the EA movement. If one were produced, it could probably be quite successful. Additionally, I don’t know if anyone in the EA movement has the power to make this happen, but a Hollywood film on AI risk could probably change the general public’s views on AI substantially.
I’ve included this recommendation last since I think it’s probably the worst strategy for getting on YouTube that’s worth mentioning. This is because it seems that, to have a book successful enough to discuss on YouTube, one has to not only write well but also get lucky in choosing a topic that ends up being popular. Currently, there are only two EA authors, William MacAskill and Peter Singer, who have been successful at doing this.
These were my thoughts on why and how to improve EA’s presence on YouTube. If you have any questions related to this essay or the data I’ve gathered, feel free to ask me them.
While working on this essay, I created a couple of data sets related to EA’s presence on YouTube. I think this data may be helpful for EA and AI safety YouTubers for finding neglected topics and understanding how their channels relate to EA’s overall presence on YouTube:
While making this essay, I also gathered data related to the popularity of AI safety channels. As far as I know there are at least nineteen AI safety channels with over ten thousand subscribers. Of these, nine have more than a hundred thousand subscribers. I have only looked at content on seven different AI safety channels so I don’t have a complete view of the AI safety sphere on YouTube. That said, of all the channels I’ve looked at, each of them have videos on the risk of extinction from AI. It seems like other risks from AI aren’t discussed by every channel, but some channels cover quite a few of them.
Overall, I think that the risk of extinction from AI is very popular on YouTube. For instance, the top three results when you search for “AI extinction risk” have over ten million views each.
If you want to help AI safety through public communication, I think it could be valuable to create more content about what people can actually do about the risks from AI. Additionally, as I mentioned previously, a Hollywood film on AI risk could change the general public’s views on AI substantially.
If you want to learn more about AI safety’s presence on YouTube, you may want to check out the data sets from the previous section.
The following are the sources I used to find various EA-related books, channels, and topics:
Hey James, I thought I would comment as it seems my channel has slipped through your net, but I have been making videos about wild animal suffering + farmed animal suffering on YouTube. Here's an example of a wild animal suffering video but there's a whole playlist of videos on the subject:
I started my channel 9 years ago after going down the vegan rabbit hole and wanting to convince others to become vegan. Over time I became "more EA" in my thinking. I've also made content about S-risks:
The channel has received over 3 million views in total but I have neglected it in recent years due to another project I've been working on. This is the year I hope to focus on YouTube properly :)
Hi Jack,
Thanks for pointing out your channel! I just updated the post to account for it.
I apologize for the omission!