Kids-themed YouTube channels are among the best performers on the platform. Leading channels like CoComelon have attracted over 175 million subscribers, and research among parents confirms that watching YouTube videos is among the most popular online activities for kids, second only to playing games.
Attracting millions of subscribers like leading kids’ channels may sound unrealistic to newcomers, but recent additions like Moonbow Kids are starting to generate thousands of views. Their secret? Creating content that speaks to and engages kids directly. Let us take a look at best practices and recent trends.
Understanding Your Audience
Leading kids’ YouTube channels have a clear idea of their audience. Just as brands aimed at adults consider demographics, income, values, interests, attitudes, and other factors when they create content, creators for kids need a clear idea of who they are writing and producing for.
Understanding younger audiences begins with knowing the limits of their attention span. Child development experts admit that not every kid develops at the same rate, but there are some guidelines to determine the audience’s potential attention span.
For kids, experts generally start with the audience’s age multiplied by two or three to determine how long they may pay attention in minutes. A four-year-old would most likely be able to focus for eight to 12 minutes. As a result, they would be unlikely to finish watching a 20-minute video but prefer shorter forms of content.
Complex stories are unlikely to appeal to preschoolers, whose entire world often revolves around family life. Older kids tend to have a larger, more complex social circle, balancing friends and family. As their life expands so does their ability to engage with more nuanced stories.
Best Practices for Engaging Content
How can developers make content more relevant to younger audiences? Best practices include consistent content delivery, interactivity, publishing visually appealing content, and crafting compelling narratives.
1. Consistency
Create a regular posting schedule that kids and their parents can rely on. For example, if your goal is to become known for lullabies that help the parents of young kids at bedtime, publishing every day will help establish credibility.
If your goal is to engage with older kids and tell more complex stories, publishing daily may be unrealistic. In addition, kids may not have enough time to engage with your stories before the next one takes their attention away.
Whether you choose to publish daily, weekly, or at another interval, your schedule must be consistent, allowing your audience to come to rely on you.
2. Interactivity
By definition, engagement is not a one-way street. Encourage young viewers to interact with your content, for example through sing-alongs and educational games to retain their attention.
Few kids are passive consumers of content. Instead, they imagine themselves as part of the story or activity in front of them. Singing along to a new song or guessing answers in a game allows them to become part of the content on your YouTube channel.
3. Visual Appeal
Kids love bright colors and engaging visuals. They also tend to prefer memorable, animated, and real-life characters. Take the actor impersonating Blippi, for example. Dressed like the cartoon version of Blippi, he would seem over the top on a YouTube channel aimed at adults. Pitched to a younger audience, however, Blippi and his sidekick Meekah have attracted over 20 million subscribers.
4. Storytelling
Humans have used stories for thousands of years to explain their surroundings, pass knowledge between generations, and entertain themselves. Kids are naturally drawn to compelling stories, but it is important to remember the age of your audience.
Older kids may love a scary tale about a haunted castle, while the same story might scare a younger audience. Likewise, younger kids may have difficulty following plot twists that help keep the attention of an older audience.
Current Trends in Kids’ Content
Education, music, interactivity, and character-driven content are among the leading trends in kids’ entertainment in 2024.
Starting with nursery rhymes, music and songs have always been in mainstay in kids’ TV programming, and they continue to attract thousands, if not millions of views on YouTube. CoComelon’s recent ‘Soccer Song’ is one example, having attracted nearly ten million views within ten days of being published.
Newcomer Moonbow Kids also counts nursery rhymes and songs among its most engaging pieces of content. Despite having a little above 1,000 subscribers at the time of writing, some of the channel’s musical pieces of content have attracted over 50,000 views within a few hours of being published.
Aimed at a slightly older audience, Blippi focuses on educational content, and the team behind the channel is not afraid to explore complex topics such as space exploration and other scientific fields.
When it comes to character-driven content, few have had a greater impact than the Korean YouTube channel Pinkfong’s Baby Shark. The channel has published successful musical kids’ content for years, but none connected with the audience quite like the Baby Shark Song, eventually becoming the most-watched video in history with more than three billion YouTube views.
Aside from a catchy melody that gets stuck in listeners’ brains, the song also benefits from the character of Baby Shark itself, which takes an animal that kids and parents may find hard to relate to and turns it into the main character’s friend.
Learning is no longer restricted to classrooms where a teacher presents a topic to a group of students taking notes. YouTube channels like Blippi are using music and even dance to engage their audiences more holistically while also delivering information.
Conclusion
Kids’ content has become a major growth area on YouTube. Delivering content that keeps kids engaged despite their shorter attention spans requires understanding the audience and developing content that is consistent, interactive, visually appealing, and above all, tells a memorable story.
Valux Digital is a globally recognized digital marketing & PR agency in New York. Businesses and projects of all shapes and sizes are welcome here. We have extensive experience in both B2B and B2C marketing. We specialize in building out customized marketing packages that take real data into account. See some of our other articles on Forbes or Entrepreneur.
