How YouTube destroyed children’s TV

How are the YouTube shows of today different from classic kids' TV shows like the Teletubbies?

If you don’t have children under 5, you almost certainly won’t have watched CoComelon. It’s a YouTube kids’ channel, the third most popular channel in the world, with 180 million subscribers. Its most popular video – Bath Song – has been watched almost seven billion times since it was uploaded in 2018 and is YouTube’s fourth most-watched video.

Bath Song is a brightly coloured animated song following JJ, the CoComelon baby who spends most of his time laughing, and his brother as they have a bath. Lyrics describe filling the bath, adding soap and the song’s chorus – “wash my hair do do do do do-do-do, wash my hair do do do do do-do-do, wash my hair do do do do do-do-do, wash my hair” – covers most parts of the body.

“CoCoMelon is hypnotic and mesmerising and, honestly, when I put it on my boy just stops what he’s doing and watches,” says Lucy, who runs a cafe and has a 2-year-old son. “If I’m getting him to do anything he doesn’t want, I just put it on and he shuts up.”

Lucy says she feels guilty using CoComelon as a pacifier, and parents on social media often refer to “CoComelon zombies” or “Cocainemelon”. But then parents have been using kids’ TV as a member of staff since Muffin the Mule arrived in 1946.

What’s changed is YouTube. Although children under 4 aren’t measured by audience research in Britain, 4% of TV screen viewing time for children aged 4-15 is YouTube, with more taking place on laptops and phones. Only 55 per cent of children aged 4-15 watched broadcast TV each week in 2023, compared with 81 per cent in 2018, according to the UK broadcasting regulator Ofcom.

“I understand why CoComelon is so attractive,” says Anne Wood, founder and creative director of Ragdoll Productions and the woman behind the Teletubbies and In the Night Garden. “I’ve watched a 2-year-old fascinated by the shapes and colours of the Simpsons. And CoComelon moves on from one thing to another very fast. But it doesn’t allow a child to make meaning from what they see.”

She cites an episode of the Teletubbies in which Dipsy’s hat is sucked up by the vacuum cleaner. Eventually, Dipsy finds the hat and dances around saying “hat, hat, hat, hat”. This, says Wood, is to do with young children’s concept of disappearance and appearance. “The child is building meaning themselves, not just looking at strawberry ice again and again and again.”

Wood hasn’t made content for YouTube. “YouTube pays nothing to originators,” she says. “In 2005, it cost £14 million (NZ$29m) to make one series of Night Garden. For YouTube, you have to put out cheap programming that keeps kids watching so you can take a share of the ad revenue. If you hit the spot, you clean up.”

YouTube shows like CoComelon are hugely popular with kids today.

“You can make an enormous amount of money from a kids’ TV show and it can be more successful than almost any other large format,” agrees Tom Harrington, analyst at Enders Analysis. “It travels well, language can change easily, there’s a new audience every couple of years and lots of merch opportunities. But to get commissioned in the first place is very difficult. In the UK there’s so many limits on what ads you can put around it so there’s no demand from advertisers and it’s not a good business for commercial broadcasters.”

One of the reasons YouTube dominates kids’ viewing is that there’s almost no homegrown alternative. Since the 2003 Communications Act, commercial public service broadcasters have no obligation to provide children’s programming and spending on British kids’ TV has fallen ever since. From 2009 to 2012, the children’s genre represented 4% of total commissioning spend, according to research from the producers alliance PACT. This fell to 3% from 2013 until 2020 and has remained flat at 2% since.

“The BBC is the only game in town for UK kids’ producers,” Wood warns. “Nobody will fund it, costs have gone up and it’s the same all over the world. The BBC used to lead the world in kids’ TV and it was copied everywhere. Not any more. Something like Night Garden, which was more English and less international, wouldn’t get made now.”

The Government briefly stepped in with the Young Audiences Content Fund, which ran from 2019 to 2022 and provided £44.1m to commission 61 shows and fund the development of a further 160 for British under-18s.

For Faraz Osman, managing director of Gold Wala, which makes kids’ factual TV including the BBC’s What’s in My Bag?, this is a cultural problem. “It’s important that British children see British children on the screen,” he argues. “There’s lots of value in having animated animals and Aussie dogs but we need to see ourselves reflected sometimes.”

In 2021, research from the British Film Institute found just 24% of Britons aged 4-18 believed they saw children and young people who looked like them on television.

YouTube, of course, isn’t a content maker – it’s more like the TV itself, a place for people to put content. As a result, you can find old UK shows like Numberjack – still used in schools to teach maths today – on the platform. But this neutrality has a weakness, as shown by 2017′s Elsagate scandal.

There is a dark underbelly to YouTube’s kids’ offering, the most upsetting of which bubbled up when journalists stumbled on Webs and Tiaras, a channel with videos of people dressed as Spiderman, Elsa from Frozen and the Joker injecting each other, becoming pregnant and beating each other up.

YouTube responded by increasing the number of moderators and changing its algorithm and advertising model so that any content labelled as being for children could not be sold as targeted content to advertisers – so that a kids’ yoga video could not be sold to a yoga mat company to advertise around. Content labelled for children receives less advertising money per video as a result.

The financial restrictions have made respectable children’s producers – such as Moonbug, which makes CoComelon – look for more conventional deals. The show now appears on Netflix and the BBC’s iPlayer. Meanwhile, Moonbug is cutting costs, letting animators go and experimenting with AI.

Strict advertising restrictions around children’s TV also drain money from commercial broadcasters. According to Ofcom, first-run UK-originated children’s programming on public-service channels such as the BBC and ITV fell to an all-time low in 2022, down to 518 hours from 640 in 2019. Spending on original UK children’s content has fallen from £114m ($241m) in 2013 to £80m ($169m) in 2022. CITV, ITV’s children’s channel, closed in September 2023 after 40 years. The less broadcasters spend, the less programming they have, the smaller the critical mass of children’s programming available – and the more parents move to YouTube.

“The BBC is the only name in town but the licence fee is capped so they’re more risk-averse,” says Wood. “Channel 4 fund a Christmas film of Mog the Cat because it’s a famous children’s book, but the chances of taking a risk on original work are almost zero.”

In a bid to cut through this noise and help parents, this week the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (Bafta) announced Children’s Scripted, Children’s Non-Scripted and Children’s Craft Team awards, to shortlist good content across all platforms. “Hopefully, the awards will highlight the good stuff and parents can navigate to that content,” says Osman. Sadly, the Bath Song was created in 2018 so it won’t be eligible.