YouTube content on wildlife engages audiences but rarely drives meaningful conservation action

Biodiversity loss is accelerating despite decades of conservation efforts, highlighting the need for new strategies to engage the public and influence policy. Digital platforms, particularly social media, offer powerful opportunities to shape conservation discourse at scale. Here, we analyze wildlife-related YouTube videos to assess dominant themes, audience engagement, and the frequency of conservation-related calls to action. We combined human-guided coding with machine learning to classify thousands of videos and associated comments in our sample. We find that appreciation for wildlife is the most common attitude, while explicit calls to action (e.g., “Contact your senator”) are uncommon. Conservation-themed videos represent a small share of wildlife content and compete with entertainment-based content. These findings highlight the need for conservationists to rethink their digital strategy, moving from awareness-only content to messages that foster deeper engagement and action. Our study illustrates how social media analytics can inform biodiversity conservation and broader sustainability goals. Wildlife content on YouTube rarely includes conservation calls to action despite high engagement, according to machine learning and human-guided concept analysis of thousands of videos and user comments.