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.