Austin, TX—The American Botanical Council (ABC) has officially launched its HerbTV YouTube channel. As a key part of ABC's ongoing educational mission for consumers, academia, industry, media, and government, HerbTV will feature more than 180 educational videos discussing medicinal herbs, related health and wellbeing topics, interviews, and in-field tours with well-known botanists, ethnobotanists, and herbalists. Viewers can enjoy 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 with new content being added weekly.
With three-quarter of Americans claiming to use dietary supplements including herbs, according to a 2024 CRN Consumer Survey, HerbTV was created as a means of providing accessible educational content featuring playlists organized by category and health conditions. To date, the channel has more than 21,000 subscribers with nearly 1.4 million views.
WholeFoods Magazine's 2023 Person of the Year, ABC Founder and Executive Director, Mark Blumenthal, shared his thoughts on the product launch and its significance within the industry: “The American Botanical Council has been working to expand its educational mission through videos for a number of years. 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.”
Promotion for the new channel will be spread across the ABC website, its peer-reviewed journal HerbalGram, other communication outlets, social media outreach efforts, member companies, media partners, and other nonprofit organizations. “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, healthcare practitioners, academics, researchers, media, and natural health products industry representatives to visit HerbTV, explore the channel, and ‘like’ and subscribe.“
