YouTube Videos Featuring Children Are More Popular

Videos featuring children under the age of 13 were viewed three times more than comparable videos not featuring children on YouTube, even when the videos were not intended for a young audience, according to new research by Pew Research Center.

Content created for children comprises a small portion of the analysis but attracted a sizeable viewing number. Content for children featuring children had an average of 416,985 views per video, while also having nearly 71,000 median views per video. On the other hand, general audience content that did not feature children had on average around 96,000 views per video, while the median views per video were just under 14,000.

The English-language videos that were analyzed during this study were by and large not intended for children. A user can not join or participate on YouTube’s platform under the age of 13, in line with United States and European laws. The YouTube Kids platform, which provides enhanced controls and content was not a focus of this study.

Pew identified 43,779 popular YouTube channels during the second half of 2018. The Center defines a popular channel as one with over 250,000 subscribers. During the first week of 2019, Pew pulled all the videos from those channels through YouTube’s API and analyzed the content of the videos and their engagement.