Between May 2nd and May 13th, the College Board hosts the Advanced Placement (AP) exams, which serve as the culmination of year-long AP courses that offer benefits to students once they enter college. Acing these tests tends to require a lot of cramming, and for many students, YouTube is a capable study aid. Specifically, Hank and John Green’s Crash Course channel saw a 41% increase in watch time in the period surrounding AP exams.
The 41% jump is based on Crash Course’s total watch time during the month-long period between April 13, 2016 and May 13, 2016, compared to the previous 31-day period. A visual demonstration of that increase can be seen in this chart, which a representative for Hank Green shared with Tubefilter:
Subscribe to get the latest creator news
As you can see, there are also small dips in Crash Course watch time that occur about once a week. The first one happens around January 9th, a Saturday, which suggests that weekend periods are slower times for the channel. Could it be that student viewers turn away from Crash Course when they are out of school? That hypothesis is backed up by the fact that, for many other channels, Saturdays and Sundays are considered good days to post videos. At the same time, the Green brothers seem to prefer to save their lessons for school days, though they do offer up the occasional weekend upload.
Teenage YouTube star Brooklyn McKnight, who makes videos with her twin sister on the Brooklyn and Bailey channel, is one of the high schoolers who has used Crash Course as an AP study aid. As she told Tubefilter:
“I often watch Crash Course whenever I need a refresher over a specific subject I’ve learned, or if I want to go over materials quickly before a test. I find it is most useful for me to sit and listen to someone else review everything that I’ve learned about a subject over the year, in a short amount of time, just in case I missed something. I’m also an auditory leaner, so watching while listening, instead of just reading, helps a lot! In the past year I’ve mostly watched the World & American History Crash Courses for my AP exams, along with many Chemistry-related crash courses! I can’t tell you how many times they have saved me when it comes to a final review for a test!”
Hank Green himself is well-aware of the jump his educational channel sees during AP season, and while he is happy to see the increase, he also sees the average high schooler’s preference for cram sessions as a questionable trend. “We’ve seen an AP test spike every since our first year of creating Crash Course,” he told Tubefilter. “Obviously, we love that people are using Crash Course to help them with school. It would, however, probably be best for everyone if they spaced that studying out over a couple weeks rather than just that last-minute cram session. We do see a slow creep up over a week or so, but it’s really the day before the tests that we get these crazy spikes.”
The last-minute employment of Crash Course may not be ideal, but there is no doubting the impact the channel now has on AP-testing students. Now that the exam period has passed, Crash Course’s watch time will surely return to its baseline level. Come next May, however, there’s little doubt it will accelerate back up to its cram-season high.
