Due to the COVID pandemic, school teachers -- like many other educators --needed to become vastly more digitally capable almost overnight. The results have ranged from the modest to the extraordinary. Teachers turned to content production at previously unseen levels. While recent years has seen increasing interest in the engagement of teachers with social media as a pedagogical tool and how it can advance their personal and professional capability, little attention has been paid to why and how they invest in creating and distributing pedagogical content via YouTube. This paper explores that question. First, we put forward a theoretical framework to allow better understanding of the issue. This draws from several lines of literature to set out a comprehensive framework to interrogate and contextualize the reasons teachers invest in creating and distributing "YouTube" content. The second part of our paper presents findings from an ongoing study of 115 teacher-produced YouTube video channels. Initial analysis suggests that the participants place strong value on gifting their knowledge and believe that sharing, contributing and creating new understandings are hallmarks of a more professional digital pedagogy. But the reasons they do so are not heterogeneous. Rather they are complex and in some ways surprising.