A screenshot from a video on earthquakes made by the Chongqing Earthquake Agency in southwest China’s Chongqing municipality

Short-video platforms are becoming a place for people not only to seek entertainment, but also to gain knowledge, as a rising number of content creators are encouraged to produce videos that educate.

Dai Jianye, a literature professor with Central China Normal University is one of the people who gained Internet fame when clips of his humorous and insightful interpretations of ancient poems went viral on a popular short-video platform. Now, Dai’s videos have drawn nearly 4 million followers on the platform.

Short-video platforms have not only put knowledge into visual form, but also made the production and sharing of knowledge possible for everyone, said Hu Baijing with Renmin University.

A user of a short-video platform called “Zhendahu” has found that people are eager to learn, but because a lot of them have insufficient knowledge about economics, they know little about risk and benefit. As a lawyer with a deep expertise in finance, she likes to teach economics on her platform. Watching her videos, a user managed to avoid a financial fraud, saving hundreds of thousands of yuan in financial losses.

The advantage of short-video platforms is that they popularize authoritative scientific and technological theories, as well as techniques in a specific field. What’s more, the creators are not necessarily experts and scholars; they could be anyone with skills worth sharing.

For the creators, short videos have become a primary tool for spreading knowledge. A chemistry teacher in southwest China’s Sichuan province said that before using short-video platforms, he could only influence his own students, but the platform now allows him to teach about 6 million fans.

Short videos with knowledge content grabbed users’ attention when they grew tired with entertainment and fragmented content and were in need of useful content.

For users, they can access knowledge on short-video platforms as long as there is a network available. In addition, by teaching knowledge in a brief and clear way, short-video platforms can further rekindle users’ enthusiasm for learning.

Supporting the expansion of knowledge-based short videos is conducive to the healthy and continuous development of the content sector of the internet industry, said Zhang Yu with Bytedance.

By Dec.2, 2019, the number of knowledge-based content providers with more than 10,000 fans on short-video platform Douyin had exceeded 74,000, Zhang disclosed. They produced 19.9 million high-quality short videos that were played more than 1.9 trillion times.