IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT
As of January 1st 2026, John and I are **no longer** the owners of Complexly (the educational media company we started 15 years ago that makes Crash Course, Eons, SciShow, Study Hall, and a bunch of other shows.)
We have been the sole owners for all that time...
But now we have gone from owning 100% to owning 0% because, for the last month, Complexly has been a non-profit organization.
https://apnews.com/article/john-green-hank-youtube-nonprofit-22dc695172444cb5ce855df5ca782058
Hank and John Green's studio becomes a nonprofit as they aim to make 'trustworthy content' online
Author-vloggers Hank and John Green are turning their educational media company Complexly into a nonprofit. The multihyphenate brothers garner millions of views on popular shows such as Crash Course that explain common classroom subjects in engaging ways. The change is intended to ensure viewers have access to engaging, fact-based content that can compete free of advertisers’ interests in the attention economy. And the move comes as John says, “there's never been more information and yet there's never been less information that you feel you can trust.” He hopes that making Complexly a “public good” will help the production studio make more trustworthy content.
DETAILS!!!
I will keep doing my work at Complexly as a content strategist and host, while John is becoming a "founder emeritus." I'll also be on our new board of directors which we are still in the process of building!
A question reporters keep asking me is "why" and "why now?" The reality is that Complexly, as a business, has always been dedicated to creating way more value than it captures, which means we've been making weird decisions.
Any normal business finding itself in Complexly's position (with shows used in pretty much every school district in the US) would be selling freemium subscription plans or doing sales meetings with school administrators or positioning itself for sale to an ed-tech platform.
I'm a business guy, so I actually see the potential value in that. The question of whether we could have more impact by going down one of those paths is, for me, actually not clear. We've considered those options!!
But John and Julie (Complexly's CEO) and the rest of the leadership team and I hit this thing from every angle and, look, our goal isn't any of those things. Our goal is to get people curious and help them learn...to make learning and teaching easier by making videos PEOPLE CHOOSE TO USE!
That's how we've been acting, that's what drives us forward, that's what's actually interesting to us. It's a public good and that's how we've been treating it. John and I haven't taken profit distributions from Complexly in over a decade anyway!
There needs to be high-quality, attention grabbing content that delivers value and has an allegiance to the truth. We have LOTS of ideas for how to deliver more value and we think this is the best way to enable that work.
Hank Green