Good information is expensive

Source: I Just Want to Fix Things, Hank Green, 12:24, uploaded 2026-05-19, playlist index 7.

Hank Green opens with a take that sounds bleak: in the current media system, anything that gets watched gets made. Earlier ideas about children’s media began with enrichment and a decision to keep openly racist material out of publication. The market now carries Fruit Love Island, toy unboxings, and racist creators Green declines to name. He then corrects his own argument. People will watch some things that still do not get made because the work costs too much.

Attention as the scarce resource

Green reaches back to Herbert Simon’s 1971 description of an information-rich world. Simon argued that information would become abundant whilst attention became scarce, summarised in the sentence “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Green jokes that Simon was looking at fax machines and would have been turned to dust by a TikTok algorithm, then accepts the basic point. People now have access to more information than they can consume, so media has to compete for attention. Obligation cannot carry a video very far. The work has to make people want to watch it.

That rule explains part of the current system. It does not explain the whole system because attention is filtered through production cost. Cheap media attracts many people who can try it, learn from one another, and gradually expose the strongest performers. Green uses video-game streaming as the example. The work looks easy to enter, yet excellence is rare. A large field of streamers gives the system enough attempts to surface someone such as Ludwig, who combines humour, ideas, audience appeal, and competence at Smash Bros.

The same selection process leaves expensive forms of media unseen. A costly video might attract more viewers than a cheap one, yet it cannot enter the market when nobody will fund its production. The people who could make it may therefore fail to discover that they are good at making it. Audience demand exists as a possibility without becoming a production budget.

The cost of being accurate

Educational media makes the gap wider. A video about atomic orbitals, cognitive bias, or the French Revolution needs informed researchers, professional fact-checking, and standards that let teachers use it inside a lesson plan. Green says that process costs far more than a YouTube channel can earn from the resulting video.

He connects this to Alberto Brandolini’s law, which he describes as the asymmetry between producing falsehood and correcting it. The person who fires a stream of nonsense can work faster than the person who checks each claim. Fact-checkers and explainers spend their time on defence whilst falsehood gets the cheaper first move.

Green then cites a 2018 MIT study of 126,000 verified true and false news stories shared on Twitter between 2006 and 2017. The study covered around three million users and 4.5 million tweets. Green reports that false news reached 1,500 people around six times faster than true news and was 70 percent more likely to be retweeted. He stresses that humans produced this difference rather than bots. False stories can be more novel and surprising because reality places fewer limits on them.

This is the environment in which Crash Course has to work. Green calls it the best thing he has helped make, then gives the credit to the team that built it: writers, editors, consultants, fact-checkers, producers, animators, hosts, and the people who can stop a sentence with “That’s not quite right.” Crash Course competes for attention by making itself watchable. It earns viewers through clarity and usefulness, while its production model remains too expensive to support itself in the ordinary way that most YouTube videos do.

When educational television follows the cheaper format

Green has watched this pressure operate in television. The Learning Channel launched in 1980 with instructional and educational programming. Over the following decades, educational programmes became more expensive to make whilst reality television became cheaper. The network kept the initials and dropped the original meaning.

The History Channel supplies a harsher example. Green allows that Pawn Stars may teach something, then points to Ancient Aliens as misinformation built in documentary form. Discovery changed the slogan from “Explore your world” to “entertain your brain,” which Green treats as an unusually frank description of the new business. He invokes the academic term “The History Channel Effect”, which Jeremy Stoddard used in 2010 for the difficulty some viewers have distinguishing documentary evidence from documentary-shaped entertainment.

The networks did not fail when they moved in this direction. Their executives found a more profitable format. The audience for serious educational material had never disappeared. The work had become expensive, and the networks chose material that could escape the cost of checking reality. Green sees the same pressure returning to online education, where cheap falsehood can win attention before accurate work has finished its first draft.

Complexly and the nonprofit decision

The pressure shaped a decision Green and his brother made about Complexly, the company they started fifteen years earlier to make Crash Course and other educational YouTube channels. They considered offers to sell the company because a larger owner might have provided the means to do more. Green could not see a reliable way to prevent that owner from pushing the work towards cheaper production.

On 1 January 2026, Complexly became a nonprofit organisation. Green presents the change as a way to protect the reason the company exists. Crash Course costs what it costs because researchers, writers, checking, animation, and production take time. A structure that treats cost reduction as the permanent answer would eventually remove the work that makes the resource worth having.

The audience for good information is already there. People want to understand wars, bodies, money, history, and mitochondria. Green’s claim is narrower than a promise that quality will win on its own: good information is expensive and bad information is cheap, so useful work needs a structure that can survive that imbalance.

Free access and the Crash Course Coin

The Crash Course Coin becomes Green’s example of such a structure. He describes coins minted in Arkansas from hand-engraved dies by Shire Post Mint, with editions corresponding to the ability to help Crash Course reach 2,000, 10,000, 20,000, 100,000, or 200,000 learners. The limited editions help the team plan the year ahead and fund projects that it considers important. The coin is a fundraising device with a physical object attached to it.

Crash Course stays free because the people who can pay help cover the people who cannot. Charging schools directly would bring procurement rules, administrators, and the sales machinery of educational media. Green wants teachers and students to use the material because they choose it. He says the cost per student is measured in pennies, which makes Crash Course expensive beside ordinary YouTube content and cheap beside traditional educational resources. He also claims that charging traditional educational-media prices could produce hundreds of millions of dollars in annual profit. The video offers that figure as a comparison, not as an audited account.

The coin therefore carries the larger argument in a small form. Attention still has to be earned, and accurate work still costs more to make. A funding model can let a resource remain free whilst people with the means to support it pay for part of the work. Green finishes by asking viewers to decide whether they can buy one, then goes to film SciShow. The new model remains ordinary work with a bill attached to it.

Limits

The video is a compact argument for a particular organisation’s funding model. Green reports the figures from the MIT study and the production economics of Crash Course in a twelve-minute monologue, so the note keeps those claims attached to his account. The study itself examined the spread of verified news stories on Twitter, which limits how directly its findings apply to educational video or to every current platform.

The video also compresses the history of TLC, Discovery, and the History Channel into a cost story. That story explains the examples Green chooses, though it does not establish that production cost alone caused each programming decision. The nonprofit conversion and Crash Course Coin are current organisational claims from the video and its description. The description links to the coin offer and spends its short preface defending Green’s affection for Ludwig.

Further reading / references

• Herbert A. Simon, “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World” (1971), the source Green invokes for the scarcity of attention.
• Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral, “The spread of true and false news online,” Science 359 (2018), the MIT study Green cites.
• Jeremy D. Stoddard, “The History Channel Effect” (2010), the educational-media term Green names.
• Crash Course Coin, the fundraising offer linked in the video’s description.
• Related: social media and short-form stories, marketing as context, care and making.