What YouTube’s Kid Appeal Means for the Future of Media
To understand how YouTube can be a far greater destination than TikTok among U.S. kids 12 and under, look to their parents for a clue.
The new U.S. Precise Advertiser Report: Kids (PARK) from contextual video intelligence company Precise TV found that almost all American children have used YouTube recently to watch content. Half said it is their favorite social media app, a sign of its tremendous brand loyalty.
Part of the reason for YouTube’s dominance is the far greater level of concern parents have over TikTok, with nearly half surveyed expressing their misgivings — a level far above that for other social platforms.
With concern for TikTok outstripping those who use it, this suggests that a key factor in YouTube’s dominance is children being allowed to access it.
While YouTube has a distinct YouTube Kids app, TikTok does not. It isn’t even technically targeted at kids, with the leading app stores rating it for consumers age 12-plus.
In the same PARK report, Precise TV found that consumption of YouTube ad campaigns on TV screens leaped from 45% in 2021 to 66% in 2022. While TV was already the most popular viewing format, it is now massively dominant ahead of other screens.
Taken with YouTube seeing 2.5 times the sampling of live TV among children, this is a clear sign of why media companies quickly need to create new distribution models that include YouTube as a primary distributor of content and not just a clip repository to upsell viewers to traditional off-platform destinations.
Pretending that doing so will upend the current revenue models ignores the fact that these have already been upended. Now is the time to act to prevent YouTube-first digital brands from gaining brand cache with younger consumers and ensure the long-term viability for traditional content creators.
The survey data of 2,000 children shows U.S. kids 12 and under prefer YouTube to TikTok by a margin of almost two to one.
The sheer scale of younger consumers favoring YouTube demonstrates how its power will only grow in years to come.
