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.
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.
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!
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.