YouTube isn’t for kids, but kids videos are among its most popular | Hacker News Reader

YouTube isn’t for kids, but kids videos are among its most popular

latimes.com

88 pointsrschnalzer131 comments

I have a friend who specifically makes content for young children. He is an animator but specifically makes content for young children. I asked him why he makes this content and he essentially summed it up as:

1) young children are more likely to incorrectly click an ad or to not skip the ad (because they can't really read or understand that the ads are skippable)

2) young children often do not have ad blocking software installed

3) young children are more likely to watch playlists

The overall effect is that young children demographic is the most profitable demographic on youtube. Also lots of parents are basically using youtube as a form of free babysitting. Next time you go to the grocery store, just look at how many kids are sitting in the cart tapping away on a phone or a tablet.

Kind of sad you're being downvoted for a completely frank comment that pretty much answers almost everyone's question in this submission.

>2) young children often do not have ad blocking software installed

Is it common for young kids to own the devices where they look the videos at?

Lots of kids watch on old phones or tablets where ad blocking software is kind of hard to install.

Use YouTube Premium, one may say!

The problem is that you likely don't want to log in the kid's device to your own Google account (with premium activated). If you want to create another account just for that, you need to lie about the age, and need to link a credit card to pay for the account — and for anything else on YouTube, then.

It would be great to have kid-specific accounts with parental control and access limitations; MS provides something similar.

It looks like a family plan (https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7507349?hl=en) may solve most of that, but you still may have to lie about the age.

That's exactly what YouTube Kids is for. https://www.youtube.com/kids/

Or, use youtube-dl and manually curate what your kids can watch, for a safe and ad-free experience. This is what my wife and I are going to do when our kid reaches the age we deem appropriate to expose it to children shows.

(I'm 100% serious, and at this point I wonder if there's business in selling a NAS preconfigured for streaming as a set-top box, with parents responsible for dropping URLs that youtube-dl will then download.)

I do this using a cron that rips videos off an unlisted youtube playlist and syncs them over to my plex server. Its great for having a group of videos to shuffle in the background while im at home.

You forgot #4: young kids have, in comparison to most adults, an insane amount of free time to spend watching content, and usually don't object if that content is of bad quality. They're the ideal audience to suck up truckloads of cheaply produced animations.

This is also very much contributing to the calc above. My kids hated it when I prevented them from watching YTKids (and subsequently uninstalled the app), and still (a year+ later) complain they want to watch those actors playing with their favorite toys.

They are supremely addicted to that stuff (even the non-objectionable ones), it was scary to witness.

My wife and I have taken the pads away from the kids permanently. They're just too crazy when it's time to be done with them.

Timers + a cool down period before the next activity = less withdrawal symptoms. I'm ashamed we still haven't removed the devices from their weekly allotment of diversions, but we don't have a TV to speak of, so it's their only time.

This is what I thought was the case since the "Adpolcalypse". I made the point to my colleagues that what YouTube wanted was slightly predatory in nature. Kids have no spending power, why are we catering to them on that platform? Why can't an adult, who has spending power, watch edgy content if they want to? Kids are exploited while adults are being treated like children.

Then there was the instance, a sort of another soft "Adpocalypse" where all these videos featuring children had creepy comments. This caused a culling of comments on certain videos, but it was ultimately a situation YouTube had fostered.

This is a fundamental flaw of advertising. As advertising has increased over my lifetime, I've become so inured to it that I literally no longer register things as advertisements. I just see straight through them. They're everywhere now; ads are shown on McDonalds' menus. Ads are on gas pumps while I'm filling. Ads are placed on seemingly every electronic or physical surface in a desperate arms race for my attention and the more they try, the more my brain just blocks the shit out.

It's just a never ending deluge of spam and bullshit in my brain and it's been there for so long and has increased to such a ludicrous degree as I actually now LAUGH when I see an ad shoved into a new place.

Like, I do not understand why anybody is spending money on advertising. You could be advertising the most amazing product in the history of the world and you would be simply drowned in spam, and no one would ever see it or care.

And to bring this rant back to topic, of course kids are the only ones left. They haven't had their minds assaulted with predatory conniving language for decades yet. They're the only ones who still look at ads as anything other than spam email but in whatever format it's in. But don't worry; at the breakneck pace advertisers are set into now, they'll be getting used to it even sooner, and it will be even LESS effective, until the only people still watching ads are infants crapping their pants. Maybe we can monetize little holograms in diapers and then sell the diapers for 5 cents cheaper. Let's just get to the bottom of this barrel!

Obviously you are wrong since literally 100s of billions of $$ are being spent on digital advertising and they are driving downstream conversions. Don't generalize your experience.

Advertisers (especially Direct Response) are some of the more analytical folks you'll meet. They won't spend a cent on a channel if they are not making it back in downstream conversions.

I think there’s a lot of people making a lot of money pretending it’s 1955. That’s my theory.

B2B advertising and directed, targeted campaigns probably have good results. The spam shit I’m talking about? The crap you see on YouTube especially? I doubt it.

> As advertising has increased over my lifetime, I've become so inured to it that I literally no longer register things as advertisements. I just see straight through them.

Not only are you very likely affected on a subconscious level by the nonstop avalanche of ads that surround us all, but worse, you have a false sense of security that you're immune to them.

> Kids have no spending power

This fact means nothing for as long as one can accumulate ad dollars based on views generated by children.

Which lasts until the advertisers figure out that the views are going to toddlers watching creepy videos featuring unlicensed Disney IP and bad Peppa Pig creepypastas, and the party ends.

For companies that can take a long term perspective, I bet having kids grow up with your product is very valuable.

Nope. In that case YouTube is just forced to adjust their targeting - they're simply showing the wrong ads!

As another comment already correctly stated: kids do have indirect spending power by being able to manipulate the spending of their parents. This works particularly well with the kind of parent that uses YouTube as an easy and reliable pacifier - this kind of parent will most likely also take the easy way out of the situation of an obnoxious kid screaming and blaring about it's dire need for product X (as seen on YouTube), which means buying the product so the goddamn kid shuts up.

Advertising is not immune from market corrections. The whole "pivot to video" trend was a market corrections to ad rates, _and_ has died off in a response to another market correction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_to_video

Of course it's a naive statement on its own. I mean only to enforce the fact that YouTube's advertising stance is predatory and has been since day one.

Children tell their parents what they want to have. They have spending power, it's just that they don't buy things by themselves.

My kid learned to skip ads as soon as she was able to hold a cellphone in her hands to watch a video. Like 12-18 months old. I was surprised to see her noticed what were ads and recognized the Skip Ad button.

To me the worst are the stupid "Live" videos, which aren't really live and just parks the children for hours on a stupid loop with a worrisome Chat window that pops open.

For a while I only let her watch YT Kids, which I configured to only allow the shows that I personally approve. The Amazon Fire tablet for kids is OK too.

> 2) young children often do not have ad blocking software installed

evil parents

You should understand that clicking on ad is not how YouTube or your friend makes money. The ad needs to have a conversion for the advertiser to continue spending on it. Imagine, if you are an advertiser and all you see are a bunch of clicks from YT and no conversions. Would you continue spending on that channel? Likely not unless you are a brand advertiser in which case they are also not looking for clicks.

Secondly, even brand advertisers have specific demographics in mind. So while a kid video will appeal to a kid specific brand (think cereals or toys), many brands won't spend in that category.

Given this, your thesis here is not entirely accurate.

YouTube the app (or web site) is not great for kids, however, there is an immense amount of content on YouTube that is wonderful for kids.

I curate content for my five year old daughter, and she can easily browse it, without descending into the rabbit hole that is YouTube-at-large. It's easy for me to do, but only because my main project (https://pianop.ly/) involves embedding YouTube videos into web pages, and I have a ton of tools that make it easy (for me, not necessarily for anyone).

I don't understand why there isn't more of this. I wish there was a large community of parents that wanted to curate content -- educational, musical, etc -- that kids could enjoy without parents having to worry so much they'll either stumble into truly awful stuff, or more likely, just spend their time looking at completely inane timewasters. (opening eggs to reveal toys, etc)

A side benefit is that if a video is embedded into a web page, the only ads YouTube ever shows is a banner. (although, I pay $10 a month to have YouTube without ads, so that isn't an issue for me. We don't have Netflix or cable or broadcast TV, by the way)

Incidentally, my daughter and I have friends (another dad and daughter) that are YouTubers, and while this girl is only 8, their content is good (in my opinion) and is a creative outlet for them and they have a lot of fun with it. The dad is an excellent videographer/editor, and the daughter is an excellent skateboarder, and they combine those things and share it with the world. (we met via YouTube and the four of us meet up at skateparks...my daughter is also really good) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzrrgcqyvF4 I just don't see the problem with this.

The first issue that pops into my mind is "community of parents curating content" doesn't scale. Or at least is hard to protect from bad actors injecting into the stream.

The best way a group could maintain control would be to build a site with embedded YT videos, but YT would rather folks watch on their site with comments, engagements, and the ability to serve up Recommended links (plus easier tracking of user accounts and watching habits). And don't forget the Watch Next stuff popping up that will redirect them out of your curated garden back into the YT wildlands. And if it's only banner ads, those are much lower value for YT and advertisers. So you're fighting YT, and they intentionally don't give you the tools to build such a project to successful scale.

And you can bet once one becomes semi-successful, others will quickly swoop in to exploit that market diluting the impact.

In theory custom TY Playlists is how YT supports this curation on their site, but it's plagued with spammed algorithmic playlists associated with any semi-popular video trying to direct traffic towards their own content.

YT's goals aren't to let groups curate a custom set of videos to then redistribute to others. It's to have users engage in an endless stream of content and maintain those sweet sweet watch times to get ad revenue.

Yeah, YouTube has lots of great content, and can be a great creative outlet for many. It's the weird black holes of predatory folks that try to capture children's eyes for monetization that cause issues.

Parent of two kids here, i'm curating videos for them as well. Maybe we could create a tool for group curating videos?

Parent of one. Sign me in.

Awesome let's do it. I've got a ton of pieces in place. rjbrown at gmail

Me too, will email you. I've been collecting as well.

Same here. I've started a small thing here: https://fugu.tv (piggy backing off this neat little repo https://github.com/iRaul/podcasts-repo )

Thanks for this, did you start this alone?

Yeah. I live in Tokyo and so my kid needs some English inputs. This is one effort to try to put that together.

I think I've seen a few people mention using youtube-dl to put content onto a file share with a Plex server watching it; and then sitting the kids in front of a TV with a streaming box attached that only has the Plex client installed (or giving them a tablet with the "locked into a single app" mode enabled, locked into the Plex client.)

This is precisely what I'm planning to do, +/- Plex (I'd prefer a FLOSS alternative; I'd prefer to avoid routing through third-party servers, and I have a good enough uplink with static IP and Wireguard to back it up).

Youtube should not be allowed to monetize any videos with children in it until they comply with the same conditions that movies that employ child actors have to. That would remove the incentive to make children perform for Youtube videos.

I was thinking today how when I was a kid and watched TV at least there was some sort of oversight about what could be broadcast and advertised on TV, especially to children. There is no such thing on youtube or the internet, so people that let their small child loose on a tablet as a babysitter scare the bejeezus out of me.

thats the (ingenuity?) of this whole digital realm

media: youtube/instagram are by far the easiest ways to reach kids with the most effective ways to influence kids/teens being influencers. see: JUUL marketing flavoured nicotine to highschoolers

gaming: loot boxes. comesetics, using kid friendly youtuber/streamers to sell FOMO; and then we get to game passes

it's disgusting how effective its been and how frankly retarded government has been to recognize the laws they made for television arent effective since kids dont watch TV

But then when regulators finally realize what's going on, there's weeping and gnashing of teeth, and "would someone think of the poor startups?".

The wild-west Internet was fine at the beginning, but then the marketing people came and fucked it up.

That's because marketers ruin everything. It's what they do. Anywhere peoples' attention goes - marketers will be there to ruin it.

Mail, radio, television, internet, email, social media... If a bunch of eyes and ears are focused on it you can bet that marketers will be moving to stand between the two and try and get their message seen or heard. The entire point of marketing is to steal your attention from whatever it is that has your attention so that they have your attention. It's insidious at best and most marketing is manipulative (especially emotionally manipulative).

Agreed, I'd say the period just before the internet really became mainstream/gained significant scale was the peak but then I sound like some dusty old hipster. communities are always great when its being built and enjoyed; just before the next, bigger audience jumps on and the mods really have to step in and ruin the original community..

sigh eternal september forever

The period just after the Internet became mainstream was still fine, too. Banner ads were slowly infecting websites, but that's about it. But now all the easy money has run dry, so every overt ad is tracking you, every mainstream news platform is dealing you covert ads, and communities (whether old-school forums or modern social media) are being infiltrated by marketers.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/health/juul-teens-vaping....

Juul Targeted Schools, Camps and Youth Programs, House Panel Claims

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EAa5B71WwAAwhOf?format=jpg&name=...

This is why I don't let my kid watch YouTube. She gets Hulu Kids, which is high-value, curated, "normal" kids shows. Amazon Prime also has a kids section, I imagine Netflix is the same.

I don't understand why more parents don't restrict their kids to these but let them loose on YouTube instead.

How would that work for those Russian toy videos my kid likes so much? Are we going to force American laws on Russia or just segregate the videos?

The internet doesn't have some magical "international waters" treaty.

ISPs can be forced to block content that infringe on their local laws.

....which would basically mean everything not subject to local laws; ie made in foreign countries?

I'm assuming you would agree for some electronic material. How do you pick and choose which should be forced to follow the law?

The legal system has a well developed notion of jurisdiction to del with that. A movie shot in California will follow California’s laws on child labor, not New York’s, even if it’s shown there.

It is not consistently applied. Look at bans on obscenity regardless of the legality where or when it was produced. So it seems just as reasonable to say that local ISPs are responsible for blocking locally illegal material.

Yes to the last question.

I mean, it is an American company paying out the ad revenue, and deciding which videos can be monetized or not. So yes, if a Russian wants to get paid advertising money by youtube, they would need to follow American laws.

This approach has a two fold problem. One, what if you are say Canadian or European, does this mean that America now gets to decide what your kids do and don't watch? Secondly, this type of action can lead to retaliation and segmentation of the internet into regional entities where you have an American internet, a Russian Internet, a European Internet etc. We have been trying very hard (not fully succufully, see China) to avoid this.

It is not an approach, it is just the law. An American company has to follow American laws, even when their customers/business partners are non-American

All that would achieve is the next popular video sharing website not being American. YouTube has a lot of viewers, advertisers, content providers that aren’t Americans.

I am not arguing for it, I am just saying that is how the law works.

The videos can be there. YouTube can't make money off of them until they comply with the conditions. Youtube can't host porn videos with 17yr olds despite them not being illegal in many countries.

> Youtube should not be allowed to monetize any videos with children in it until they comply with the same conditions that movies that employ child actors have to.

Yes. If Youtube monetization model rewards parents psychologically abusing their children and profits from it. It is cleary that Youtube is at fault.

Google does not want to take responsibility when they host the video, promote the video, and profit from the video. And that creates an incentive to reward bad behaviour and shock content.

If YouTube isn't for kids, why do they host videos that are clearly and explicitly targeting toddlers? For example: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=videos+for+todd...

The most egregious thing, in my mind, is that YouTube wraps toddler videos in ads for things like the John Wick movie and local breweries in my area. The fact that this isn't a difficult problem to solve is the strongest indication that A) YouTube knows exactly what's going on, and B) they frankly do not care because they can make a buck off of showing shockingly inappropriate content to children.

> " The fact that this isn't a difficult problem to solve is the strongest indication that A) YouTube knows exactly what's going on"

It may also be the case they're totally incapable of doing it right, despite trying their best. I'm not sure that possibility really changes the situation though; either way the outcome is not quality entertainment for kids.

If they can't target ads, what exactly can they do? That's their entire raison d'être surely.

It may be the case that they do it with sufficient accuracy to stay in business, but insufficient accuracy to provide quality content streams for children.

My above comment seems a bit unpopular, but I really don't think youtube is deliberately trying to show inappropriate content to kids. I think it's happening despite their efforts to do something about it. In other words, they are trying and failing. Maybe I'm giving them too much credit, but you've got to remember a lot of youtube employees have kids too.

My (uninformed and possibly wrong) guess is that YouTube wanted to maintain the fiction that, to the best of their knowledge, everyone using the service was the person who signed up, so that it could argue it was not intentionally showing videos to children. When YouTube knows kids are using the app, it's supposed to be doing lots of things to protect their privacy (which it has not been doing).[1]

Building an algorithm to guess when children were likely using YouTube on their parents' account, in order to show age-appropriate ads, would show that YouTube does know that kids are using the app. So my (again, uninformed and quite possibly wrong) guess is that YouTube did not try and fail at creating such an algorithm; they deliberately decided not to try.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/19/ftc-app...

FB is good at behaviorally targeting ads. Google is good at at search ads (90%+ of revenue). Google sucks at behavioral ads. Source: I manage lots of ad spend for many companies.

>If YouTube isn't for kids, why do they host videos that are clearly and explicitly targeting toddlers?

Because parents would never ever turn on videos on Youtube for their toddlers to keep them entertained while the adults are doing whatever adults need to do, right?

Once you realize that kid content on Youtube is very valuable to parents who find it better than TV, ads aimed at adults start making sense. Because it's adults who go on Youtube to find these videos.

My toddler gets very angry whenever an ad comes up. Actually, he gets angry when we take the phone away from him, it’s just not worth it to even start a video anymore (yes, he becomes content for now but at the expense of heck later). We’ve basically gone with zero screen time now and bring books to the restaurant instead.

aren't those ads targeted to the viewer (you) rather than the content of the video? if you watch it in incognito do you see those same types of ads? I'm not disagreeing with your sentiment, just curious. Also, the uploader of the video certainly has made a conscious choice to monetize a video targeted at children. YouTube certainly didn't do anything to help the situation, but some of the blame should probably go toward the uploader of the video.

As an aside: my kids occasionally watch videos in the YouTube Kids app (version of youtube curated for kids). That app certainly never shows wildly inappropriate ads (though it does have ads).

YouTube is aware that multiple people watch videos under one account. They are also aware of the nature of the content of the video and should be able to adjust ads based on that as well.

> "aren't those ads targeted to the viewer (you) rather than the content of the video?"

That shouldn't matter; youtube should not be showing adult ads to an adult when the adult is watching a children's show. Did nobody at youtube consider the probability that the adult's account is watching a children's TV show because there is a child in the room and the adult put the tv show on?

It's easy to blame Youtube but parents are IMO responsible for what their kids do, up to a certain age. Many parents use smartphones and tablets as pacifiers for their kids and that is just wrong.

There is a reason France has banned devices on primary schools.

A recent study found that:

> Early results revealed that kids who use screens for more than 7 hours per day show physical changes to the brain in the form of premature thinning of the cortex.

https://bigthink.com/mind-brain/screen-time-nih-study-60-min...

More than 7 hours of screen time per day seems like child abuse. Or as I call it when I do it, "work".

Was watching a nursery rhyme channel with my 1.5 year old son...then an ad comes on for a drug trafficking series on Netflix...drugs, guns, etc

I sympathize but wasn't that an advertisement targeted at you specifically? Meaning, the platform didn't know you were with your child. Should targeted ads change their age appropriateness with the content of the viewed material? I imagine not...

Or... maybe we should use the built in webcam to determine the age of the user watching the video and use that to target ads. This could be a very effective solution. /sarcasm

We simultaneously what internet companies to do exactly the right thing but don't want to allow them to collect the data needed to do that right thing. It is an ironic behavior I notice in the tech community.

They don't need data for that; the right thing would be to not show ads on kids content, and disable the garbage recommendation algorithms too.

>Should targeted ads change their age appropriateness with the content of the viewed material?

Yes, they most definitely should. A video that specifically targets babies/children should not have ads that are 18+.

Where else in the world would you view media for children and be shown ads for drug dealing dramas?

Because adults sometimes watch children's programming too (yes, really), and as far as they can tell, that's what's going on.

This exactly.

But to be honest, maybe this is an opportunity to create some kind of maturity level standard, where content shouldn't be above a set threshold, regardless of source. On YouTube For Kids, it would be lower than regular YouTube, which would be lower than RedTube. Advertising would be compelled to build in functionality that checks a page's threshold and serves ads that match.

I'm not saying I agree with the idea, just putting it out there.

See my reply above. Content designed and marketed to children nowhere else has 18+ advertisements. Same standard should (and has to imo) be applied to "new" media.

That's because nobody else (in the streaming video space) is trying to serve ads based on who's watching the content. YouTube is in a different advertising market that nobody else has yet attempted to enter.

When it comes to children's programming...it shouldn't be based on who's watching, it should be based on if the content itself is designed for children or not and serve ads accordingly.

That's what every advertising platform does...

The content is designed and marketed to children.

It doesn't matter that some adults would watch also. You would never in a million years see an ad for The Wire while watching Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers, etc. Pretty obvious why not...

The same standard should be applied to "new" media.

We went through this with our daughter[1]. I used to laugh at all the incredibly poorly targeted ads that'd show up in the middle of the ABC's song for like car insurance or whatnot. But that was mostly an annoyance.

What's more dangerous, IMHO, was the tendency for YouTube to queue up stuff that's increasingly dubious. So, you might start out with something that was high quality (see note below) but up next would be some weird apparently mass produced garbage with like people opening easter eggs, and it'd drift off from there. You really have to work to curate your own youtube content, and they don't make it easy.

[1] Incidentally, Super Simple Songs was our favorite. High quality, clever, instructional videos that we felt good about letter her watch.

Don't YouTube have a special kids app for showing videos from YouTube to kids, I've heard they do?

Ah, they do, https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

Or maybe YouTube isn't a trademark?

They do have a YouTube kids app. It's not great & needs heavy supervision.

You have the option to limit videos to only ones you approve but this really prevents finding new videos unless you do a bunch of work. There are some really good videos we've found while letting our kids explore. Most are British.

If you choose to let them search "kid friendly" videos you have the option to block videos but it doesn't alter their algorithm any it seems. For example, some of the most annoying videos are ones where a child & parent are opening & playing with some toy. The video is really just a terrible ad for a product & it seems YouTube is filled with these. I'm curious if the child/parent actors are writing these toys off as business expenses or getting them at discounts for trying to sell them to kids on YouTube.

I would hope so, especially if you're raking in $22 million a year reviewing toys:

https://www.businessinsider.com/ryan-toysreview-7-year-old-m...

With L.O.L. Surprise, they don't even need to buy commercials, Youtube does that for them:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lol-surprise-hot-new-toy/

Wow. Well this makes a lot of sense. I know what will be happening to the YouTube Kids app in our house...

There's loads of articles and videos(on YouTube, ironically) showing that YouTube Kids is just using algorithmic filtering to figure out what's safe for "kids" and it's trivial to find content on it that's not child friendly at all. If it was manually curated then it would be a product maybe even worth paying for, but as it is it doesn't guarantee safe content at all.

I tried the YouTube Kids app a while back.... it was a terrible experience.

It was either straight merch type stuff "Hey let's play with this very specifically named toy." If I use the account that gets YouTube ads... WAY inappropriate ads.

Or just painfully inane content.

Granted there are channels I liked, anything associated with PBS or Sesame Street... but at the time you couldn't block channels you didn't like, nor could white-list anything so I just deleted the app and my kids don't get to watch YouTube unless I'm actively sitting with them watching, and filtering.

Based on everything else about Youtube, I don't trust YouTube enough to give them another chance.

The YouTube + Kids has been an unsolved problem for many years now. It’s not easy putting those two together. Google knows that and have been working on it continuously. Very early on, around 2008, they realized that 2+2 is somewhere between 3.9 and 4.1 and with advances in ML and AI they’ve increased confidence levels significantly. They are now (2019) pretty close to proving that 2+2 comes out 4 (or more precisely 4.001337) regardless of how many hours of video are uploaded every minute. That said, they are also cautious not to raise hopes too high. As with all complex problems, it may take years to solve, if at all.

Of course the videos are "among its most popular". You know those inane autoplaying videos after you just watched something where everyone rushes to stop the countdown? Well, kids don't. Lazy parents all over the world park their kids in front of YouTube, and they will happily watch whatever inane crap YouTube throws at them for hours on end. Except for the lack of spending money, they are the perfect viewer. It's disturbing watching young kids "use" YouTube, watching repeats or slight variations of the same mind numbingly stupid video for hours, lulled into an algorithmic trance hitting their brain just right, without the maturity to break the vicious cycle.

If kids 'need' TV shows to watch and parents need a source of children's entertainment they can trust, isn't that were we normally expect an organization like PBS to fill the need?

With an organization like PBS, they have a reputation of manually curating what they show, while something like Youtube Kids just has automated systems and manual reports to supplement it. It's hard to believe Google/Youtube could ever provide automated curation as well as PBS. How many media articles that boil down to "youtube showed this to kids but PBS never would have" are we going to have before people get the idea?

I think YouTube is avoiding responsibility here - hosting videos for kids with billions of views and running ads on them, while saying "it's not for kids" to save money to actually curate / avoid showing videos not safe for them. YouTube kids is also disingenuous here - no 10+ year old would want to watch that.

Saying "it's the responsibility of parents" is the same PR driven avoiding of responsibility by YouTube.

YouTube themselves make it as easy as possible for kids to use YouTube (preinstalled apps on TVs etc), they should bear some responsibility too.

Oh, I completely agree. Youtube should stop pretending they have a service suitable for children. Youtube should be making it clear to consumers that their service is for mature viewers only because they are incapable of vetting content for children with the accuracy consumers rightfully expect from a children's entertainment company.

Either go out of their way to prevent kids from using the service or invest and make it safe for kids. I think they will lobby / PR heavily to continue to do neither.

YouTube keeps sending out weird notices saying that you can't use it if you are under 13 and to send in my driver's license and other information, but then I see all these videos where the people making them are clearly under 13 and targeting kids. Plus, they never do anything when I respond saying that I don't feel comfortable with sending something like that. My daughter has an app called Like and that definitely has a lot of kids uploading videos. I think these companies just need to make it look like they care or are trying to do something about the issue.

Lol, you browse YouTube logged in?

Does there exist a descent app to create YouTube playlist without logging in?

If you use Android, try NewPipe, it can do that and more.

Verizon FIOS TV has a YouTube widget that can't be disabled. I was really surprised when we switched from cable. In the past we would let our kids on youtube to watch something on rare occasion but suddenly the TV has youtube built-in with no way to disable. You can set an age restriction but when you try to go to something that is age restricted it prompts you to go to settings to change it. There is no way to just block the widget like you can a channel. I think the work around is to setup a YT account just for this purpose, set age restrictions and then sign-in to it on the FIOS box but we haven't felt like we have had to go there yet. I see discussions and complaints to Verizon for years with customers wanting to block widget or restrict kids from changing the age restriction setting with a pin.

> He said that the platform’s stated age policy is largely a ploy to avoid complying with the law, which makes it illegal to collect data on children under 13 without parental consent.

Getting tired of my at the time 6 year old videos being mixed in with mine, I tried to make an account for her and set the age to 6 and it was shutdown. I had to get out a credit card and jump through hoops to get it back on. I wish I could set an age and language filter on YouTube. For now its you can watch anything in your subscriptions and the off chance you want to watch something new we'll help.

Apparently all kids like to watch the same thing over and over again which is why the view counts are so high but i don't doubt YouTube is the most popular site for kids. Not sure about the ad stuff cause I pay for premium.

Isn't for kids? The reems of kid and toddler focused playlist that show up on YouTube say otherwise. They're trying to hook them when they're young.

Sometimes if you catch a new video soon after it's been uploaded you can see it's in a state before the recommendations have been generated, the few times I've seen it happen the recommendations were entirely kids videos with vibrant thumbnails and strange names.

I have no idea how youtube gets it's recommendations when this happens, but if it's some sort of randomish fallback list, I can easily believe that cheap, mass produced kids content is a huge fraction of youtube uploads/views.

Why doesn't YouTube community-source the content tags? I see a "report" button, but nothing that allows me, as an audience, to decide what category this video belongs in. I see tags such as "gaming" but no other tags to further delineate to sub-groups of "gaming". For such a large platform, I don't see a way to filter content accurately. I wonder if they rely too much on "recommended for you" algorithms.

That's actually why we had to come up with our own topic typology in this report - some of the category tags that YouTube provides were too broad to be useful ("TV Shows") and others were way too specific ("Music of Latin America")

Music of Latin America seem pretty broad.

To my understanding the content uploader sets those tags / categories. Maybe then old abandoned YouTube accounts might get more visibility to their videos since the community can proper label videos.

Probably because it would be gamed for SEO purposes? Not that it's impossible, but crowd-sourcing stuff is not that easy at scale.

My sister in law has kids that are in the 7 - 13 year range. The girl specifically (she's 9 or so) will just put on a youtube video and then just watch whatever it recommends after that endlessly.

To adults, the content is absolute garbage, but to her its entertaining. I noticed that most of the stuff she watches is just some tweens or twenty somethings doing every day life stuff (sitting in a pool, making spaghetti, etc). The only real difference is that they do it with high energy and make a big deal out of everything.

WOOOOAAA noodles feel weird! NO WAAAYY the sauce is RED!! HOLY COW this hot TUB is SO HOT!

I guess it works because these videos often have 400k to millions of views.

Sounds exactly the same as anything on the Disney channel.

Full report is here, in case it interests anyone: https://www.pewinternet.org/2019/07/25/a-week-in-the-life-of...

This is a very good report.

Makes me wonder why such data has to be generated by an external “fact tank” when, with some caveats, such could come directly from YouTube.

The YouTube Data API is a bit...arbitrarily fussy. (example: https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/1154482894850498561)

I'm tempted to revamp my old scraper for it and open source it.

I just avoid YouTube altogether for my child. There are some really good TV network apps like Barnkanalen SVT (Sweden), ZDF/KIKA (Deutschland) that make quality content, have no ads and are free. And no risk of watching something I don't want them to.

Same here. Also all the big streaming services (Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu) have kids sections with quality children's programming. I don't understand why parents let loose their kids on YouTube when these alternatives exist.

> I don't understand why parents let loose their kids on YouTube when these alternatives exist. Yes, especially with all the horror stories of weird videos that I've read about even here in HN.

> Also all the big streaming services (Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu) have kids sections with quality children's programming.

All of them are absolutely swamped with hypercommercial psychologically manipulative selling-toys-to-kids programming, though it's from big corps so I guess that makes it okay.

> I don't understand why parents let loose their kids on YouTube when these alternatives exist.

Because YouTube, for all it's real problems, is both cheaper (free with ads) than the others and has a huge trove of excellent kid-appropriate content (including professionally produced stuff like the National Geographic Science 101 series) that isn't (AFAIK) on any of the other platforms and because most people aren't familiar with the horror stories, or if they are (accurately or not) interpret then as extreme edge cases, not likely events.

The "kid demographic" is Youtube's most profitable demographic. Though the lawsuit may appear as impetus, this has been in the works for a long time.

What about YouTube Kids? https://www.youtube.com/kids/

http://archive.is/Ry0Db

Is that a Youtube for Kids competitor with no ads, and only pro-social educational content?

PBS Kids? https://pbskids.org/apps/pbs-kids-video.html

They don't discourage children from browsing the site, just from creating accounts.

These smear pieces against YouTube keep coming, and YouTube execs seem to think they can help it by appeasing the media; it only alienates their audiences, and paints a target on their back.

I agree. Example: Facebook. Journalists keep shitting on Facebook. Facebook doesn't care. Facebook (with WhatsApp and Instagram) keeps winning. Caving to the blackmailing would've probably left them in a worse position, like having to axe features that are popular for their users.

It's banned in our home. It's awful.

Baby Shark, du du du....

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