Corridor Digital’s Wren produces a video series called The True Scale that uses visual effects that reveals the often unfathomable sizes and scales of various subjects, from microscopic atoms to the total biomass of ants. Wren is an engineer at heart and if my memory is correct this series is his outlet for education related content creation.
I believe we should offer money for Wren to produce an episode that will draw attention to the scale of factory farming.
How much should be offered to be cost effective? I’ll give 2 naive calculations.
1 - With Precedent
Open Philanthropy gave Kurzgesagt around 2.6 million USD “to support the creation of videos on topics relevant to effective altruism” over 2 years. Over the last year, Kurzgesagt has produced 24 videos. Each video is thus worth at least $100,000 USD to Open Philanthropy.
2 - Napkin Maths
The lowest performing The True Scale videos produced ~2 million views. (The median looks somewhere closer to 4-6 million)
We now calculate under the following assumptions
- YouTube video receives 2 million views
- 0.1% of viewers cut their meat consumption by 1 day directly
- Creating 1 vegetarian year is $11.
- Short form content has 0 effect (YouTube Shorts/Tik Tok/Instagram Reels)
This gives us the calculation that the video would produce ~5.5 vegetarian years thus the intervention would be cost effective at ~$60 USD.
I am willing to contribute $30.
I am surprised to see how wildly the outcomes of these approaches vary. According to your napkin approach, such a video is not worth more than $60 (or in other words: if it is more expensive, there are more effective approaches). That seems hardly a worthwhile endeavor to pursue.
haha I was hoping to provoke some discussion on the huge difference I found.
Otherwise, an email to Wren is free to write.