YouTube has provided limited guidance, and has itself appealed to the regulator for further clarification. While it may be straightforward for established kids’ brands (eg Peppa Pig or Nickelodeon) to decide they’re made for kids, it is anything but for many YouTubers that appeal to a wider set of ages, or for content that is not specifically intended for kids but still appeals to them, including DIY, gaming, arts & crafts, sports, music videos, etc.
It is too early to fully gauge the impact, but anecdotally we’re hearing about 80% declines in daily revenue in some cases. These types of ads have gone away, leaving content creators with a reduced share of ad revenue.
Why are content creators so upset?īecause YouTube is effectively a gigantic data-driven ad exchange, the vast majority of revenue creators earn is from personalised ads, eg those targeted at profiled audiences rather than the surrounding content. It remains to be seen how well this will work, but we’re already hearing reports of whole channels being auto-tagged this way. YouTube says it will police the self-designations using automated scanning tools, and it will automatically tag content if it detects videos that haven’t been correctly classified. Basically, if content includes elements likely to appeal to children-such as cartoon characters, child actors, simple songs, early education material-then it must be tagged as ‘made for kids.’ The determination is highly subjective and has led to anguish among content creators that appeal to tweens, teens and families in particular. YouTube is requiring all channel owners to designate either their whole channel or individual videos as ‘made for kids’ if children under 13 are its intended audience. How does YouTube know which channels are for kids? YouTube is doing this to comply with the US kids’ data privacy law, COPPA, although the company has decided to roll out the new policy worldwide. This means YouTube is no longer collecting personal data-including technical identifiers like device ID, IP address or geolocation-from viewers of those channels. It also disabled a range of features that need user personal data to function, like comments and channel notifications, and the ‘save to playlist’ and ‘watch later’ tools, among others.
On January 6th, YouTube stopped serving behaviourally targeted (aka ‘interest-based’ or ‘personalized’) advertising on content intended for a kids’ audience. And the changes YouTube is making will impact how brands engage with kids, and how kids’ content is funded. But last week was a key milestone in the enforcement of existing kids’ data privacy laws. Or you would have thought so, given the cacophony of voices alleging a government conspiracy to remove kids from YouTube.
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