YouTube has already emerged as an alternative to broadcast television for children, who are watching Minecraft tutorials, music videos and cartoons online in their tens of millions.
Now YouTube appears ready to take a bigger role in funding and curating children’s shows on its service, recruiting a dedicated head of family entertainment and learning to work within its YouTube Originals division.
The recruitment ad, first spotted by Recode, is seeking someone to “lead YouTube Original’s efforts in supporting the next great storytellers in filmed entertainment, from action to romance to horror, sci-fi and beyond”.
“For years we’ve seen a lot of traction across both YouTube EDU and family entertainment. This role will help us further build out these offerings,” a spokesperson told Recode, when questioned about the role.
The job posting follows reports earlier in the year that YouTube was mulling creating a “family-friendly” version of its service, as well as claims of wider plans by Google to let parents to create accounts for their children and control how they use its services.
Children are watching YouTube videos in their droves: more than 2.2m in the UK alone in 2013, watching an average of just over four hours a month, according to telecoms regulator Ofcom’s Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes report.
Published in October 2013, it found that 11% of 3-4 year-olds and 9% of 5-7 year-olds were watching videos on sites like YouTube at least once a week, with those percentages rising to 29% for 8-11 year-olds and 56% for 12-15 year-olds.
A separate question about children watching music videos online – the majority of which will be on YouTube – found that 5% of 5-7 year-olds, 14% of 8-11 year-olds and 36% of 12-15 year-olds were doing this at least once a week.
Some of YouTube’s most popular channels are already aimed at children. In August 2014, the service’s second biggest channel was DisneyCollector, a Brazilian channel devoted to unboxing new toys. Its videos were watched 324.4m times that month alone, according to data compiled by analytics firm OpenSlate.
YouTube’s fourth biggest channel that month was Stampy, a child-friendly Minecraft channel created by British YouTuber Joseph Garrett, whose videos were watched 217.9m times that month. Garrett, who is signed to MCN Maker Studios, is preparing to launch a second channel focused on education.
Stampy also guest-stars in Maker’s new YouTube show for children, Meet Me at the Reck, which launched this week. Hosted by musician Andrew WK, it is being pitched to parents as “Sesame Street for the digital generation” and is housed on the company’s Cartoonium channel for children.
YouTube is far from the only digital platform looking to commission and curate children’s entertainment, though. Netflix and Amazon have both been investing in original shows for their services.
In 2013, Netflix commissioned more than 300 hours of original shows from Hollywood studio DreamWorks Animation, including Turbo F.A.S.T., Puss in Boots and King Julien. This month, Netflix also struck a deal for a new animated film and 12-episode series based on King Kong, which will debut in 2016.
Amazon, meanwhile, launched its first three original children’s series earlier this year, with Tumble Leaf, Creative Galaxy and Annedroids made available to stream on a range of the company’s devices, having been piloted on its Amazon Prime service to test feedback from parents.
“Kids today are not looking up to the Justin Biebers and Miley Cyruses, they might have different role models, so how can we create at the core smart characters that kids will want to emulate?” said Amazon’s head of kids programming Tanya Sorensen at the MIPTV television industry show in April.
Angry Birds maker Rovio is also getting into this area, building its ToonsTV service into every Angry Birds game. Its videos – which include shows like Transformers and Fraggle Rock as well as Angry Birds cartoons – have been watched more than 3bn times since its launch in March 2013.
Meanwhile, children’s broadcasters from the BBC and Disney to Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon are finding new digital ways to deliver their shows to children alongside their traditional channels, while startups like Hopster and Toon Goggles have launched mobile apps to deliver shows.
Even so, it’s YouTube that presents the biggest competition to all of these companies. “YouTube is the most powerful kids property in the world right now,” said Dylan Collins, chief executive of children’s marketing and research network SuperAwesome, in a speech at the Children’s Media Conference earlier this year.
SuperAwesome’s survey of 1,000 British 8-10 year-olds in 2013 found that YouTube was the most-used mobile app for this age group. Meanwhile, its survey of 8-16 year-olds found 70% saying that they used YouTube, while 42% of them agreed with the suggestion that “YouTube is the future of TV”.
A more recent survey in 2014 found that 20% of British 9-12 year-olds subscribe to 50 or more YouTube channels, while 33% of 8-14 year-olds have uploaded a video to YouTube themselves.
Collins compared YouTube’s impact on the traditional children’s TV world to Facebook’s on the games industry, with the emergence of social gaming and companies like FarmVille-maker Zynga.
“We’re seeing the same thing with TV content and YouTube: the internet guys are going in and messing up the furniture,” he said.
Youth research companies Dubit and Sherbert surveyed more than 5,000 parents and children in the UK and US earlier this year, and suggested that the last Ofcom stats may already be out of date when it comes to measuring the amount of children watching videos online in those countries.
Their study claimed that 29% of 2-5 year-olds and 25% of 6-7 year-olds are watching videos online every day, rising to 33% for 8-10 year-olds and 45% for 11-14 year-olds.
That still pales in comparison to traditional television – 78%, 85%, 89% and 87% respectively for those age groups – but with YouTube, Netflix, Amazon and others all increasing their efforts to fund and promote children’s shows online, the first set of figures is only likely to rise in the coming months and years.
“Kids still love channels but YouTube gives them the opportunity for forge their own path and discover content in a way that other services don’t allow,” said Peter Robinson, Dubit’s global head of research.
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