As part of its ongoing educational mission for consumers, academia, industry, media and government, the nonprofit American Botanical Council (ABC) has announced the official launch of ABC’s YouTube channel, HerbTV.
HerbTV from the ABC on YouTube.com is the home of more than 180 educational videos on medicinal herbs and related health and wellbeing content and includes interviews and in-field tours with renowned herbalists, botanists and ethnobotanists. The channel already has more than 21,000 subscribers and nearly 1.4 million views.
To provide easy access to the educational content on the channel, HerbTV features playlists organized by category and health conditions, as well as ABC’s new Adopt-an-Herb videos, videos and webinars on herbal sustainability, and sources outside of ABC, including the public television series Healing Quest, The Medicine Hunter and others. New content is being added weekly.
“The American Botanical Council has been working to expand its educational mission through videos for a number of years,” said ABC Founder and Executive Director Mark Blumenthal. “We’re highly pleased to finally release HerbTV as an international online portal that we anticipate will greatly expand the interest in and understanding about numerous herbs and botanical medicine for anyone seeking accurate, and entertaining video content.”
According to the Council for Responsible Nutrition’s 2024 Consumer Survey, three-quarters of Americans use dietary supplements, many of them being herbal. The World Health Organization estimates that around 4 billion people, or 80 percent of the people in developing countries, use herbal medicine.
“Market data show that the statistics around online video viewing are staggering, and it’s clear that people increasingly flock to social media outlets for educational videos, with YouTube leading the way with 2.5 billion monthly, active users worldwide in 2024,” Blumenthal added. “In fact, in 2022, 62 percent of internet users in the United States accessed YouTube daily, and 92 percent used it weekly. This presents a huge opportunity for ABC and its botanicals-based educational content.
“We encourage interested and curious consumers, health care practitioners, academics, researchers, media and natural health products industry representatives to visit HerbTV, explore the channel, and ‘like’ and subscribe.“
HerbTV, started in 2008 by pharmacist, former herb shop owner, and videographer David LaLuzerne, was donated to ABC in 2018, and received an updating, rebrand, reorganization and new content as part of the ABC-branded relaunch.
HerbTV will be supported by extensive promotion through ABC media, including its peer-reviewed journal HerbalGram, its herbalgram.org website, its numerous other communications vehicles, and social media outreach. Additionally, awareness of HerbTV will be enhanced through partnerships ABC has created with its member companies, various media partners, and other nonprofit organizations.
For more information, visit www.youtube.com/herbtv or www.herbalgram.org.
