My kids don't have a YouTube channel — but they pretend they do
My kids don’t have a YouTube channel — but they pretend they do
Los Angeles Times
David Pierson
The YouTube experience doesn’t end for my kids after I take away their iPads.
It follows them everywhere: when they’re playing with toys, riding in the backseat of our car or roaming the supermarket aisles.
That’s because the two have developed a habit of living out their lives as if there’s an imaginary camera trained on them, just like their favorite YouTubers.
Last year, YouTube launched its first kids app, YouTube Kids. The app, which had more than 10 billion views the first year alone, comes with stricter advertising guidelines, parental controls and voice search that has an uncanny ability to understand kids (It took me weeks to realize what my kids were saying when they kept asking to watch a channel with 2.7 million subscribers called CookieSwirlC. I kept calling it Kooky World Sea).
Children ages 11 and younger are one of the fastest growing audiences for digital video, growing nearly four times as fast as viewers ages 18 to 24, according to eMarketer.
That growth has no doubt been perpetuated by the legion of young YouTube creators who have uploaded playtime videos, educational tutorials and “unboxing” clips — videos showing in painstaking detail the process of removing a new toy or gadget from its packaging.
Read more: http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-youtube-kids-20160627-snap-story.html