Before any advice, the numbers. I run Geoscopy. The Instagram account is at around 179,000 followers. The YouTube channel is still small. The email list is about a hundred people.
I lead with that because most articles about becoming a geology communicator skip the part where they tell you what the numbers actually look like, and what those numbers buy you. This isn’t a manifesto about following your passion. It’s the version of this guide I wish someone had handed me at the start.
What “Geology Communicator” Actually Means
The phrase covers a wide range of work. On one end you have university outreach officers, museum educators, and government science writers, people doing this as a full-time job, paid by an institution. On the other end you have independent creators on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Substack, most of whom are doing it on top of day jobs or studies.
Where you sit on that spectrum matters because the path looks completely different. An institutional science communicator typically needs a degree in science writing or a track record in journalism. An independent creator needs an audience and a niche that monetizes.
Decide which one you want before you start picking platforms. Most of this guide is for the second group, because that’s the one I know.
The Numbers Most Articles Won’t Show You
The geology niche is small, and brands rarely come knocking the way they do for travel, fashion, or fitness creators. Most direct income on Instagram, when it exists, comes from products the creator builds themselves: mineral specimens, print runs, online courses, ebooks.
YouTube is structurally different. Ad revenue scales with watch time, and a channel producing 8–12 minute essays consistently can build into a meaningful income at scale. Long-form video is where the geology creators I know have made the clearest progress toward replacing a salary, but the build is measured in years, not months.
A blog with strong SEO and a niche audience can produce affiliate and ad revenue. The numbers are smaller than YouTube, but the work compounds: an article published in 2024 can still drive traffic in 2027 if it ranks.
If you go in expecting Instagram fame to translate into a livable income, you’ll be disappointed. Pick your platform knowing what each one actually pays.
Choose a Format That Matches Your Skill, Not the Trend
Most “how to become a creator” advice recommends the same stack: short-form video for reach, YouTube for income, a newsletter for direct relationships. That’s correct in the abstract and useless in practice, because it ignores what you’re actually good at and what you’ll keep doing in month nine when the novelty has worn off.
The honest version:
Writers should write. Fifty strong articles on a blog will outlast five hundred Reels. Google still sends real traffic to good geology content, especially for the long-tail informational queries that AI overviews handle badly.
If you’re comfortable on camera, video is where the money is. YouTube remains the most durable platform for science communication, and long-form essays on volcanoes, mineralogy, and deep time have an audience that’s actively looking for them.
Instagram still works for geology if you have a good eye and access to decent photography. Mineral close-ups, outcrop shots, well-composed fieldwork — all of it travels. The catch is that Instagram has decoupled following from reach over the last two years; the platform now behaves a lot like TikTok.
If you have none of those skills yet, pick the one you most want to develop and accept that the first year will look amateur. That’s normal. It’s also necessary.
The First 12 Months
If I were starting today, here’s how I’d structure the first year.
Months 1–3: build a backlog. Pick one platform and produce 10 to 15 pieces before the first one goes live. As soon as you start posting, you’ll find that the bottleneck is research and production, not how often you hit publish. A backlog gives you runway for the weeks when work or family swallow your evenings.
Months 4–6: publish on a fixed schedule. Once a week is plenty. Twice a week if you’re producing short-form. Don’t overcommit. The single biggest reason creators quit is that they set an unsustainable cadence in month two and burn out in month four.
Months 7–9: start measuring. Which posts performed, which didn’t, and why. The creators I see plateau are the ones who keep producing without ever sitting down with their analytics. The ones who grow are the ones who actually read the numbers, including the bad ones.
Months 10–12: add a second platform. Not before. A YouTube creator who adds Instagram, or a blogger who adds YouTube, has leverage to grow faster on the second platform because the first one feeds it audience. Going wide on day one means going thin on every platform.
What Actually Grows a Geology Account
A few things matter more than the rest.
A clear topical identity. People follow accounts they can describe in a sentence to a friend. “Mineralogy and rock ID” is describable. “Earth science generally” isn’t. Geoscopy gets away with a wide scope because the visual identity and tone do the work of holding it together, but most accounts won’t have that going for them and need to niche down harder than I did.
Consistent quality at a cadence you can hold. I look at posts I made in 2022 that did well at the time, and a lot of them would barely register today. The visual bar on Instagram has moved fast, and it’s still moving. Budget real time for the craft itself, how the post is shot, written, edited, and not only for how often you publish.
A hook for every piece. Hooks turn out to matter more than I expected when I started. “Granite is an igneous rock” loses the reader; “this rock is older than every land animal that ever existed” doesn’t. Same content, completely different reception.
Mistakes I Made That You Can Skip
I spread myself across three brands at one point — Geoscopy for geology, a separate brand for general science, and another for cultural video essays. It was a mistake. Each brand needed its own voice, audience, and cadence, and one person running all three did all of them at half the quality they deserved. I’ve since parked the other two to focus on Geoscopy. If you have multiple ideas for brands, pick one and ignore the others for at least 18 months.
I under-invested in email for too long, which I now regret. Any social platform can throttle, suspend, or restructure your account on a Tuesday afternoon with no warning, and an email list is the only audience that’s genuinely yours. Start collecting addresses on day one, even if the first newsletter goes to ten people who already know you.
And I underestimated how much a real website matters. A proper archive of articles, embedded videos, and a searchable glossary is what makes a creator citable and findable years after a post is published. A Reel has the lifespan of a mayfly.
What Comes After Year One
Geology communication is a good thing to do and a hard thing to make pay. The people I know who’ve made it work treat it as a five-to-ten-year project.
Geoscopy, for me, is partly a public service, partly a creative outlet, and partly a long bet that science communication will keep mattering as the rest of the internet fills up with synthetic content. I think it will, but I’d rather be useful to a few thousand actual readers than performative to a million scrollers, and that shapes most of the choices I make about what to publish.
That’s how I’d think about it, anyway. Your situation may rearrange the priorities.
The rest of Geoscopy is where I put this into practice — long-form articles on rocks, minerals, deep time, and the geology behind the news. The newsletter is the best way to get it without algorithm interference.
