Kurzgesagt is a Germananimation studio founded by Philipp Dettmer. The studio's YouTube channel focuses on minimalist animated educational content, using the flat design style. It discusses scientific, technological, political, philosophical and psychological subjects. Narrated by Steve Taylor, videos on the channel are typically 4–16 minutes in length, with many of them available in German through the channel Dinge Erklärt – Kurzgesagt. Aside from their German channel, they began creating videos for their Spanish channel En Pocas Palabras – Kurzgesagt near the end of 2019. While their English channel mostly finances itself with donations from their viewers and individual sponsorships, the German channel is financially supported by Funk, the online presence of German public broadcasting, and the Spanish channel is sponsored by Wix. With over 12 million subscribers, the studio's channel was ranked as the world's 454th or 463rd most subscribed as of June 29, 2020.
History
The Kurzgesagt YouTube channel was created on July 9, 2013, shortly after the founder, Philipp Dettmer, graduated from Munich University of Applied Sciences. The first video, which explained evolution, was published two days later. The videos were more popular than expected, and in six years the channel went from a project worked on during Dettmer's free time to a design studio with over twenty-five employees. In 2015, Kurzgesagt was commissioned to do a video on the end of disease for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Thereafter, it worked with the foundation on a number of other commissions, including videos about motherhood mortality. In 2019, Kurzgesagt became the first German channel to surpass 10 million subscribers on YouTube. In March 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Kurzgesagt uploaded a video about how the human body reacts after contracting COVID-19. The video has over 25 million views, making it the most viewed video on the channel.
Name
The name derives from the German kurz-gesagt, which, when taken literally, translates to "shortly said". The English equivalent of this phrase would translate to 'in a few words' or 'in a nutshell', the latter being used as an English subtitle for the channel's name.
