Kids will watch Mr. Beast give away $1 million for eight straight hours, but zone out during a 20-minute history lesson.
We can’t blame them.
This reality check hit hard for social content creators Kevin Ostrowski and Sam Wasylenko.
Fresh out of college and armed with years of content creation experience, they joined Subject with one mission: Figure out why billion-dollar education companies produce videos that make watching paint dry seem thrilling by comparison.
In that mission, they found a solution in turning traditional classroom content into something students actually want to consume.
When YouTubers Beat Billion-Dollar EdTech
Imagine getting outproduced by your neighbor’s nephew, who reviews video games in his bedroom. That’s where most educational content stands today.
Kevin discovered just how embarrassing this gap had become:
“Someone with 10,000 followers, or even 500 followers, probably has better content abilities than these billion-dollar EdTech companies who are making these videos for online learning.”
Students today consume professional-grade content all day, every day. They watch YouTubers with Hollywood-level production budgets, streamers with better lighting than most TV studios, and TikTok creators who understand pacing better than most film directors.
So, when teachers get stuck with edtech that looks like it survived the dial-up era, the obvious fallback becomes what’s always worked before: stand-and-deliver lectures followed by the classic “gotcha” quiz.
But students who grew up with YouTube and TikTok don’t just expect better production quality.
They demand it.
Give them content that feels like a relic from the early 2000s, and they’ll mentally check out.
There’s also that excuse everyone—even famous YouTubers when their latest video flops—loves to use: “Students have goldfish attention spans.”
But Kevin calls it a convenient myth. “I can sit and watch a YouTube video—or podcast—that’s four and a half hours long,” he adds. “It’s not an attention span problem. It’s an engagement problem.”
Sam also noticed the same pattern during his college years when 99% of his lectures could have been 20 minutes instead of an hour and a half. “I feel like [professors] were just stretching it just to meet that time.”
Teachers were padding content like college students trying to hit a word count, except the audience wasn’t grading on a curve. They were voting with their eyes and feet.
The BuzzFeed Formula for Educational Content
Sam and Kevin developed their content philosophy around one simple rule:
If you have fun making it, they’ll have fun watching it.
Ground-breaking stuff, right? Apparently in education, yes.
Their goal became creating what Sam called “the BuzzFeed of education entertainment,” meaning content that actually respects students’ intelligence while meeting them where they consume media.
This meant ditching the corporate training video vibe that plagues most educational content. Gone are the days of tricking students into learning with PowerPoint preset cartoons and Comic Sans font.
Instead of treating students like inmates who need to be talked at for prescribed amounts of time, Kevin and Sam started treating them like the sophisticated media consumers they actually are. Think less prison warden, more Netflix algorithm.
It’s all about giving your target audience what they actually want to watch.
“Respect the student,” Sam observes, “They’re not stupid. I think that’s the bottom line.”
4 Steps to Make Learning Actually Addictive
Kevin and Sam knew that telling teachers to “just make content more engaging” was about as helpful as telling someone to “just be funnier.”
So they recommend a four-phase process that tackles the real obstacles of competing with YouTube for student attention. This works whether you’re producing the next viral educational video or just trying to make Tuesday’s algebra lesson slightly less painful than root canal surgery.
- Phase 1: Know Thy Enemy (aka Content Your Students Watch)
Our social content creators started by doing what most education companies apparently never think to do—they compared their content to what students actually watch. They stacked educational videos against popular YouTube channels, TikTok creators, and streaming content in similar topics.
When educators spend time watching what kids are watching, they can use the skills they’ve mastered in building curriculum to break down what makes it work.
Take, for example, an edited YouTube video. Then ask:
- What keeps the momentum going?
- How does a “storytime creator” or “TikTok yapper” keep people engaged?
- What’s the main (or learning) objective here?
- How does this structure maintain engagement?’
Teachers already know how to take complex concepts and make them digestible. (That’s literally their job description.) Those same analytical skills can help them chunk algebra into learnable steps and explain why a gaming streamer holds attention for three hours straight while a traditional lecture loses kids after ten minutes.
Now, armed with these insights, teachers can finally design content worthy of competing for student attention.
- Phase 2: Break the Lecture Marathon, Get Interactive
Instead of expecting students to absorb information through hour-long monologues that would challenge even the most dedicated podcast listeners, Kevin reimagined content delivery.
“What if a teacher plays a video for 2 minutes, and then talks about and expands on that video,” he explains. “Then [the teacher] put [students] into a group, where they talk and work through a couple problems, and the whole class regroups to discuss and continue watching the video.”
This multi-modal (or interactive) style treated learning like a good Netflix series—varied pacing, different formats, and enough variety to keep viewers engaged. Less Ken Burns documentary (worthy but lengthy) and more educational variety show.
Taking an interactive approach keeps things interesting, but more importantly, it respects how different students process information best. Some students light up during discussion, others during hands-on work, and some need that visual reinforcement from video.
When you cycle through bite-sized video segments, interactive discussions, hands-on activities, and group work, every student gets multiple entry points into the same concept. Something that can’t be done when subjecting students to monotone content delivery methods that results in asking “anyone, anyone?” like the teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
- Phase 3: Choose Real Excitement Over Scripted Performance
If you’re creating your own video content, you want it to sound natural and engaging—like explaining something cool to a friend over coffee, instead of presenting a quarterly earnings report while your soul slowly dies.
The difference between engaging content and corporate training videos often comes down to one thing: genuine enthusiasm versus the kind of scripted performance that makes customer service training look Oscar-worthy.
Sam has a refreshingly direct approach: “Have fun. It goes back to the saying, if you have fun making it, they’ll have fun watching it. Be authentic, have fun, and be respectful.”
This meant embracing conversational delivery, natural reactions, and actual personality instead of the robotic presentation style that makes most educational content feel like customer service training modules. Students can spot fake enthusiasm from miles away. They’ve been consuming authentic content creators who genuinely care about their subjects for years.
The goal is to create content that feels like it came from real humans who actually enjoyed what they were teaching, rather than corporate spokespersons reading teleprompter scripts about quarterly earnings.
- Phase 4: Track Real Engagement, Not Just Completion
Instead of celebrating when students simply endured their content until the end, Sam and Kevin focused on three indicators that actually mattered:
- Voluntary engagement
- Peer sharing
- Genuine excitement about learning
The feedback they received from interviews with current students proved this worked. “All the kids that Kevin and I have interviewed say, ‘I can tell that this platform was made for us,’” Sam recalls. .”They tell us, ‘it’s not clunky, it’s not boring, it’s very engaging, and it’s exciting.’”
Real success looked like students spending extra time with materials because they wanted to, not because they had to. One student described Subject’s content with a word that rarely gets associated with educational platforms: “intelligent, but easy.”
That’s the sweet spot: content smart enough to respect student intelligence, but accessible enough to actually be useful.
Students Will Want More
Both Sam and Kevin trace their passion back to teachers who showed real excitement about their subjects, weren’t afraid to try new approaches, and made the effort to meet students where they actually were.
Those educators created something rare: authentic engagement that felt chosen rather than required.
Now, the two creators are on a mission to create content about education that recreates that same spark. Through their work with our Subject team and social content creation, they’re talking to students and teachers who prove that when educational content respects student intelligence and matches their media consumption standards, genuine curiosity replaces compliant resignation.
The outcome is better engagement metrics, but also students who take on learning the same way Kevin and Sam once did when they encountered teachers who truly cared enough to make education feel alive.