This YouTube Channel For Kids Earned One Billion Views In Just One Week

While the COVID-19 pandemic has put a heavy impact on the world, several businesses actually have benefited from the lockdown orders. Kid-friendly YouTube channels are certainly one of them and the notable evidence among them is Cocomelon, a YouTube channel that has animated nursery rhyme videos. If you don’t have kids then you might find it unfamiliar. But if your kid loves YouTube, you must have seen this channel at least once. In the last seven days, the channel has gained over one billion views, which is a record for the platform.

Videos for kids have always got much more popular on YouTube as Children have a lot more downtime and they are willing to watch the same videos over and over again. To illustrate how the coronavirus outbreak has boosted the view count of the Cocomelon channel, let’s take a look at the below chart. In the last week of February, the channel got 600 million views, which is only half of what it achieved two months later. 

Cocomelon is overall a great place for your kids, but the segment for family-friendly videos on YouTube has raised controversies due to the freedom that YouTube allows. Anyone can freely create and upload their videos with not many safeguards in place to protect kids from inappropriate content. YouTube was under criticism after some creators were found exploiting the hunger for children content by releasing videos with suggestive themes to collect views and ads revenue.

The below video, called “ Elsagate”, the video used popular characters from kid movies to attract children, but the content of the video was not that fit for children. 

YouTube’s response to the controversy is hiring more moderators and restricting videos aimed at children from getting targeted ads, leading to a substantial drop in ads revenue for the creators of those videos, hence, lowering the incentive and motivation to make more. However, YouTube still put $100 million on a fund to bankroll original content for children. The platform also releases YouTube Kids where parents or children can freely browser videos without seeing non-appropriate or adult content.

YouTube is certainly a harder platform to earn money from children’s content, but the opportunities and profits aren’t limited within the platform. Those views can actually turn into multiple deals with other companies. Cocomelon, for example, turns its billions of views into deals with firms to generate several flows of revenue. It is currently working on making its own merchandise such as toys based on its characters.
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