I need to say something that most science communication agencies will not say, because it undermines their entire business model. The quality of your content is not the problem. The problem is that nobody sees it.
I have worked in science communication since 2006. Over that time, I have collaborated with more than 14,000 academics across every scientific discipline, and I have watched the same pattern play out thousands of times. A university or research group commissions a beautifully produced video, or a stunning interactive website, or a carefully written long-form article explaining their work. It gets published. A few colleagues share it. The press office sends out a release. And then nothing. A few hundred views. Maybe a thousand if they are lucky. The content sits on an institutional webpage, buried under millions of competing pages, seen by almost nobody outside the people who already knew about the research.
This is the single biggest waste of money in science communication today. And the industry barely talks about it.
Is Content Quality Enough for Science Communication?
No. It is not. And I say that as someone who has spent nearly twenty years building science communication brands across magazines, podcasts, video, and animation. I care deeply about quality. But I have also learned, through hard experience, that quality without distribution is just expensive decoration.
There is a dangerous assumption that has taken root in the science communication industry: the idea that if you make something good enough, the right people will find it. This is a fantasy. The internet has never worked like that, and it especially does not work like that now. We are producing more content globally in a single day than was produced in entire years just two decades ago. Every platform is saturated. Every feed is overflowing. In that environment, the notion that quality alone will cut through is not just optimistic. It is negligent.
I have watched this assumption waste significant portions of research communication budgets for nearly twenty years. Institutions spend tens of thousands of pounds on production and almost nothing on promotion. It is like building a world-class restaurant in the middle of a field with no road leading to it. The food might be extraordinary. Nobody is coming.
Why Most Science Communication Relies on the Press, and Why That Is a Problem
When I ask research institutions how they plan to promote their science communication content, the most common answer is still: "We will send it to the press."
That approach has three serious problems.
First, journalists reframe everything. That is their job. They are writing for their audience, not yours. The nuance you spent months getting right will be compressed into a headline designed to generate clicks. Sometimes the resulting coverage is excellent. Often, it subtly distorts the original findings in ways that the researchers themselves find frustrating. I have had this conversation with hundreds of scientists over the years, and the experience of seeing your work misrepresented by the very coverage that was supposed to help is remarkably common.
Second, most science stories do not get picked up by the press at all. The volume of research published every week is enormous. Journalists are stretched thin and increasingly under commercial pressure. If your story does not land in the first twenty-four hours, it is gone. The press is not a distribution strategy. It is a lottery.
Third, and this is the one that bothers me most: even when press coverage does happen, the scientist loses control of the narrative entirely. The story is now the journalist's story, told in the journalist's voice, with the journalist's framing. The authentic voice of the researcher, the person who actually did the work and understands the nuance, disappears. You wanted science communication. What you got was science journalism. They are not the same thing.
How You Promote Science Content Matters More Than How It Looks
This is the uncomfortable truth that the science communication industry needs to confront. In a world of overwhelming digital noise, how you promote content is more important than how it looks.
I can already hear the objections. Quality matters. Design matters. Storytelling matters. And they do. I am not arguing for bad content with good promotion. I am arguing that the industry has the balance completely wrong. It invests disproportionately in creation and almost nothing in dissemination. Scientific dissemination, the process of actively getting research findings in front of the audiences who need to see them, is treated as an afterthought or someone else's responsibility. It should be the centrepiece.
After generating over half a billion social media impressions for the researchers I have worked with, I can tell you exactly where most science content fails. It is not in the creation. It is in what happens next. Or more accurately, what does not happen next.
A well-made piece of content with a proper distribution strategy will outperform a masterpiece with no strategy every single time. I do not mean marginally. I mean by orders of magnitude. I have seen it happen thousands of times. A competent explainer video, distributed strategically across the right platforms with the right messaging at the right time, will reach more people than a beautifully cinematic short film uploaded to a university YouTube channel with 400 subscribers. That is not a criticism of cinematic ambition. It is a statement of reality about how digital platforms work.
How Scrolly Science Gets Real Science Seen by Real People
This is the problem I built Scrolly Science to solve. Not just creating great content, though we do that. The real differentiator is what happens after creation.
Scrolly Science operates active promotional channels across all major social media platforms. When we produce content for a researcher, we do not hand it over and hope for the best. We run the distribution ourselves. We manage the strategy, the scheduling, the platform-specific optimisation, and the ongoing promotion that turns a single piece of content into a sustained campaign. That is how you get science seen in 2026. Not by making it and hoping, but by actively, strategically, and persistently putting it in front of the people who need to see it.
This is what makes Scrolly Science fundamentally different from other science communication agencies. Most agencies are production companies. They make things. Good things, sometimes excellent things. But their job ends when the deliverable is handed over. Ours does not. We handle strategy, creation, dissemination, and impact measurement as a single integrated service, because after nearly twenty years in this industry, I have learned that separating these things is exactly why so much brilliant science content never reaches its audience.
Why Strategy, Creation, and Dissemination Cannot Be Separated
The reason integration matters is not philosophical. It is practical.
The strategy you set at the beginning determines what kind of content you create. If you know a piece is going to be promoted primarily through short-form social video, you design it differently from something intended for a website or a conference presentation. The format, the length, the tone, the pacing, the visual language: all of these are shaped by where and how the content will be disseminated.
Equally, dissemination only works if the content was built for the platforms it will live on. You cannot take a twelve-minute documentary, chop it into sixty-second clips, and call that a social media strategy. The content has to be designed from the start with distribution in mind. That requires the people doing the strategy, the creation, and the dissemination to be the same team, working from the same brief, towards the same goals.
Treating these as separate workstreams, or worse, treating dissemination as someone else's problem after the creative work is finished, is the structural reason why so much excellent science content dies in obscurity. I have spent nearly twenty years watching it happen, and I built Scrolly Science specifically to stop it.
Scrolly Science provides the complete science communication pipeline: strategy, creation, dissemination, and impact. We work directly with researchers, in their voice, across every format, and we do not stop until the work has actually reached the people it was made for. Since 2006, we have done this with over 14,000 academics and generated over half a billion social media impressions in the process.
If you are producing science communication content that nobody is seeing, the problem is not the content. The problem is everything that happens after you hit publish.
Simon Jones is the founder of Scrolly Science and Animara Studios. Since 2006, he has worked with over 14,000 academics across every scientific discipline, generating over half a billion social media impressions and building award-winning science communication brands across magazine, podcast, video, and animation formats.