{"id":18875,"date":"2025-11-05T10:00:58","date_gmt":"2025-11-05T14:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/?p=18875"},"modified":"2025-10-30T07:16:28","modified_gmt":"2025-10-30T11:16:28","slug":"educational-youtubers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/2025\/11\/05\/educational-youtubers\/","title":{"rendered":"Educational YouTubers Balance Integrity and Income in the Age of Algorithms"},"content":{"rendered":"

YouTube has become one of the world\u2019s largest \u201cclassrooms\u201d, but the creators behind these educational videos face challenges while balancing quality teaching with making a living. A new study from Boston University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Michigan titled, \u201cPlaying ‘Google’s Game’: How Educational YouTubers Manage Tensions Between Education and Monetization | Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction<\/a>,\u201d and published in the Association for Computing Machinery, examines how \u201cEduTubers\u201d navigate the pressures of platform algorithms and monetization while maintaining their commitment to educating others.<\/p>\n

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Allison McDonald<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The research, led by Tess Eschebach of the University of Chicago and published in the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, draws on interviews with 12 popular U.S.-based educational YouTubers. The study finds that while creators are intrinsically motivated to share free, high-quality educational content, they must continually adapt to YouTube\u2019s algorithms and business models to sustain their work.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe reason they’re doing this work is because they are passionate about the content that they’re trying to make videos about, and want to share their knowledge about something, \u201d says Allison McDonald<\/a>, assistant professor at Boston University and co-author of the study. \u201cA lot of the videos that they’re competing against are video game playthroughs and other high-visual, high-action, clickbaity content. And a lot of them felt that this was difficult to balance with their desire to make really high-quality, like truthful educational content, while also getting Google’s algorithm to put them at the top of the page.\u201d<\/p>\n

The study revealed that:<\/p>\n