I hope you’re all staying healthy and safe given everything that’s happening in our world right now.
It’s definitely important to stay vigilant and be cautious when things like this come up, but we don’t want to let fear and panic win either.
One of the things we saw this firsthand with on YouTube was the announcement of COPPA laws and what that would mean for family and kid’s creators.
It’s been about 2 months now since COPPA laws have been in effect on YouTube.
We personally heard from so many of you who were concerned about things like:
- Demonetization
- The algorithm miscategorizing channels
- Traffic plummeting
- Revenue decreasing
A lot of creators did give in to fear and just decided to quit their channels before they even really had all of the information on how COPPA laws would affect them. Here’s what the data has shown in regards to how COPPA has affected channels in 2020.
This is what we’ve seen between 40 million channels, 6 billion subscribers, and 2.5 trillion views:
If your channel is not labeled ‘for kids’, COPPA laws may not affect you. So far, we’ve seen that non-kids or family channels are experiencing little to no change in regards to their channels and stats. Even channels that create content that aren’t made for kids (under 18), but a lot of kids end up watching have experienced little to no change as well.
Instead, we took the data straight from channels that make content undoubtedly for kids.
What we saw was that kid’s channels that had 1M+ subscribers had a slight increase in views, while those with less than 1M subscribers saw a 12-13% decrease in their views.
While we can’t definitely say what’s going on here… we have a few ideas as to why this is happening.
- YouTube might favor content they know is safe. The new search and discovery feature on YouTube kids is very new and YouTube may be favoring content it already knows is safe vs. content they don’t know as well. Over time, I think we’ll see those smaller channels start to grow again as these systems improve.
- Smaller creators slowed down on their publishing schedule. Given the news of COPPA laws, a lot of smaller kid’s creators either slowed down on, quit, or took a break from creating content while they were learning about the effects of COPPA laws and what it would mean for their channels. Larger creators actually made MORE videos and used their channels as platforms to discuss what was going on with COPPA/YouTube.
We know a lot of the changes with YouTube Kids (and these types of creators) are still in it’s infancy, so we’ll report back on more as we hear more, but so far it looks like the changes are mild to none.
If you’d like to hear more about this data, you can watch a short video on this here.
Thanks for reading!
Stay safe, healthy, and have a great weekend.
Keep changing lives,
Tim
Sources used in this video:
– https://socialblade.com/blog/made-for-kids-initial-look-at-the-data/
– https://www.videoamigo.com/youtube-research/a-month-in-whats-the-impact-of-coppa-on-made-for-kids-youtube-channels/