page_title: Crash Course (YouTube)
section_title: Complexly-branding and YouTube Learning Fund (2018–present)
hierarchical_section_title: Crash Course (YouTube) / History and funding / Complexly-branding and YouTube Learning Fund (2018–present)
caption_attribution_description: English: Anna Akana at the 2018 Vidcon EU in Amsterdam
context_page_description: Crash Course is an educational YouTube channel started by John and Hank Green, who first achieved notability on the YouTube platform through their VlogBrothers channel.
  Crash Course was one of the hundred initial channels funded by YouTube's $100 million original channel initiative. The channel launched a preview on December 2, 2011, and as of February 2020, it has accumulated over 10 million subscribers and 1.2 billion video views. The channel launched with John and Hank presenting their respective World History and Biology series; the early history of the channel continued the trend of John and Hank presenting humanities and science courses, respectively. In November 2014, Hank announced a partnership with PBS Digital Studios, which would allow the channel to produce more courses. As a result, multiple additional hosts joined the show to increase the number of concurrent series.
  To date, there are 38 main series of Crash Course, of which John has hosted nine and Hank has hosted seven. Together with Emily Graslie, they also co-hosted Big History. A second channel, Crash Course Kids, is hosted by Sabrina Cruz and has completed its first series, Science.
context_section_description: Starting with the Statistics course in early 2018, Crash Course series that are not PBS co-productions began to directly identify as Complexly productions. Also that year, Crash Course launched an Arabic-language edition of World History hosted by Yasser Abumuailek and produced by Deutsche Welle (DW), which was uploaded to DW's Arabic YouTube channel. In July 2018, YouTube announced its YouTube Learning initiative, dedicated to supporting educational content on the platform. A few months later, as $20 million was invested into expanding the initiative, Crash Course secured additional funding via the initiative's Learning Fund program. However, PBS Digital Studios remained one of the primary sources of funding Crash Course, and the network also continued to help in finding sponsorships for the show.
  The channel surpassed 1 billion video views in February 2019. In July, YouTube launched Learning Playlists as a continuation of their Learning Fund initiative; while videos in Learning Playlists notably lack recommended videos attached to them, in contrast to videos included in regular playlists on YouTube, they also include organizational features such as chapters around key concepts and lessons ordered by difficulty. After Learning Playlists' launch, Crash Course's video content was formatted into several of these playlists. The channel reached 10 million subscribers in November 2019.
caption: Anna Akana hosted Business: Entrepreneurship in 2019.
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