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
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.
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.
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?
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.
That's what every advertising platform does...
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.