Harnessing the potential of children’s video content
With three quarters of children now using mobile devices, YouTube for Kids will tap into young digital natives at a previously unforeseen level writes Patrick Walker, CEO of Rightster.
When YouTube launches a new offering, content owners don’t just sit up and take notice. They take action. It acts as a barometer of market trends and influences. It directs and shapes the development of online channels and media consumption.
This was certainly the case at the recent Kidscreen conference in Miami, which saw the launch of the video pioneer’s first standalone app for children. YouTube Kids has been designed with an interface specifically for children to use, and has trusted names in children’s programming on board including Hasbro Studios, PBS, Dreamworks and one of our own partners, Jim Henson.
With YouTube leading the way on developing a dedicated mobile offering towards content for kids, numerous doors are going to open for children’s video content accessibility, even among businesses previously reluctant to embrace what YouTube offers.
Until recently, some children’s content owners have been hard to convince of what YouTube can do for them. Unsure how to get the most from the platform, some have been tempted to remove all of their owned children’s content so that the assets – many of them with huge and engaged audiences – are not ‘wasted’.
It’s a natural response to want to protect content ownership and control its circulation, but one which could easily lead to fan frustration and even brand damage. It is also a limiting commercial choice for these wary companies, one which inhibits them from learning the fullest about their audiences.
By using the data collected through online video platforms content owners can more effectively understand their evolving audiences and their content consumption in greater detail. Many broadcasters are well aware of the intrinsically channel-agnostic approach to accessing content fluidly from device to device. By actively ignoring the potential for YouTube as an access point, they have missed opportunities to engage with really passionate fans of the content to entrench the brand.
They also cannot develop a truly global understanding of where these fans are and how they move. It’s almost as if they are willingly limiting their own potential.
By turning a blind eye to the channel, they are missing out on unclaimed views and monetisation options. For example, we recently discovered nearly 2,000 unclaimed videos for Australian children’s music group, The Wiggles.
The ‘missed’ views on these videos totalled 250m. The formalisation of an active kids’ platform should ease many of these reticent channel owners concerns. It’s also worth noting that the crown for the leading global YouTube channel by subscribers has just been stolen from gamer PewDiePie by Funtoys Collector – a toy ‘unboxing’ channel aimed at children.
Other companies have understood YouTube’s role as a supporter and additional channel for their audience for some time, but now want to use it as a springboard to engage with new fans. One example here is the Little Brown Bear, a French-language cartoon which has found a new lease of life online. It finished running on TV years ago, and is not sold anywhere to traditional broadcasters, but regularly averages over 12m views on YouTube after France Televisions decided to place it on YouTube. In fact it has been so successful online, that the broadcaster now wants to add it back to its TV schedules.
Using YouTube to access and grow new global content audiences is all about understanding and responding to varying local languages, their markets, and the users themselves. This in itself can present an issue for content owners. Children often want to be spoken to directly, even more so than typical users. Making videos available through multiple, relevant channels so they can be shared and celebrated by local fans to their own networks is crucial.
This in turn opens up more revenue streams for rights owners, which can then be fed back into more localised content production. This is why YouTube for Kids is such a vital opportunity for content holders – it can facilitate local community creation and grow an audience organically in a way few other platforms can match.
It can act as a single, safe access point to aggregate many kids-themed videos to mutualise audiences and subscribers, before redirecting viewers to an official channel and building the community further. The opportunities here for companies with multiple content themes – from animated series, to video games, to toys – are numerous for content owners looking to entertain the young.
This is going to be a watershed moment for children’s video content online, some of which will be developed specifically for YouTube, such as the new Thomas & Friends and a new series with characters from Sesame Street.
Given three quarters of children use mobile devices these days, YouTube for Kids will tap into young digital natives at a previously unforeseen level. Children’s content is driven online by three main connection points: kids’ desires on what content to watch, wanting to belong to communities with other children, and wanting the engagement of being part of the story being told.
Savvy content owners will be seizing this chance to build their own content for the service by harnessing these themes. Connect these new offerings from content owners with inbuilt audiences with other channels which are producing YouTube-exclusive content, such as science and cooking, and the availability of children’s video online is set to explode.