No corner of television is safe from being upended by streaming, not even kids’ programming. Studios are struggling to keep up with the viewing habits of Gen Alpha, which has largely flocked away from big networks. Younger audiences are also opting for other platforms, including YouTube, where roughly a third of the website’s audience is under 17. Much of what they’re seeing on the video platform is likely being made by an independent producer.
Representative of the shift is the rise of YouTube creators like Ms. Rachel, who specializes in nursery rhymes and songs created specifically for toddlers and preschoolers, says Kayla Cobb, senior TV reporter for The Wrap. Rachel, who holds a master's degree in music from NYU, started posting videos in 2019. Since then, she’s amassed more than 12 million subscribers.
“We spoke to several heads of different linear networks who, about five years ago, they would tell us, ‘Absolutely not, we're not going to put full episodes of our shows on YouTube. It's monopolizing our viewership.’ Now? Everyone does that. That is a norm. So it's this huge evolution of the industry,” Cobb explains.
A few decades ago, Cobb says it would’ve been enough for a show to air on broadcast and provide ideas for merchandising lines. Now, a show would likely need multiple plans for different platforms, including standard streaming, YouTube, a short-form content source like TikTok, some type of gaming presence, as well as standard social media, film, and merchandising strategies.
So what’s changed? Cobb points to the size of large networks.
“They're not able to be quite as nimble as YouTube creators are, and they're not able to create content at the same level that parents or kids want. I don't have any kids of my own, but I do have a 5-year-old nephew, and he could just blow through content. He could sit and watch kids unboxing videos all day long. And that's hard to do when each episode of a show takes six months and costs a quarter of a million [dollars] or something.”
This doesn’t mean kids aren’t watching mainstay shows like Sesame Street. But Cobb says viewing habits are tough to track.
“It’s hard to tell who exactly is watching anything, because they'll be watching it on YouTube, on linear, probably on a streaming platform. You can't discredit kids who are watching on YouTube Shorts and TikTok.”
She adds, “We know that Bluey is clearly a runaway hit, it dominates Nielsen. But everything in the middle ground to the lower-watched end, it's hard to have any idea of how popular it is.”
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As linear TV ratings have dropped amid a shift in viewing habits, Cobb says that kids’ programming does prevent churn, when subscribers will cancel or not renew their plans.
“You're more likely to keep subscribing to Disney+ via the kid if your kid has a Disney+ show that they love, but it does not really contribute to new subscribers. So there is an incentive for these companies to keep producing children's TV. But one of the people I spoke to, Cyma Zarghami, said it best: Children's TV is just in the middle of this revolution. We're not going to know how it shakes out until a few years have passed.”
In the interim, Cobb says new opportunities could be on the horizon as traditional networks eye collaborations with independent creators: “There is this circle that's happening, where the big players are looking at these smaller spaces and going, ‘Oh we can collaborate. I can lift you up with my many millions of marketing money and help you achieve your creative vision, and you can bring in viewers.’”