YouTube’s challenge with children represents something much bigger
Last week the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal reported that YouTube is being investigated for alleged breaches of kids digital privacy and are possibly planning to shift kids content away from the main YouTube site.
It’s important to distinguish between what this is and what it isn’t.
This is not about YouTube ignoring kids
It’s hard for anyone outside of the ecosystem to understand the product development challenges for a kids audience. The team at YouTube Kids have done an excellent job in creating a children’s AVOD platform. Within the wider Google organisation, the Play Family team have recently been rolling out more policies to improve the quality of kids and family apps. It’s easy to criticise, but Google should be applauded for being increasingly proactive about kids.
This is not about YouTube
It would be a mistake to understand this solely as a YouTube issue. The company’s struggle with children is a reflection of how the global internet audience is profoundly changing.
For the last twenty years, the internet’s operating system has been shaped by companies who created a business model for adults, designed around personal data and advertising. YouTube is a product of this but so are most other social networks and consumer services. This landscape is now being reshaped, both by the 170,000 kids who go online for the first time every day but also the digital privacy laws being enacted to protect them. These laws mandate a zero-data environment, the complete opposite of how our adult digital media ecosystem works; no tracking, no targeting, no behavioural advertising.
To understand the magnitude of this change, consider the following; today digital privacy laws cover about 130m children (mostly in the US and Europe). However PwC expects that by 2021 over 800m children (about 34% of the world’s kids) will be covered by similar laws as other countries around the world respond accordingly.
It’s beginning to dawn on Silicon Valley that children (and their accompanying digital privacy laws) may be as disruptive to the current wave of technology companies as smartphones were to Microsoft.
Debate about how YouTube could be split is missing the point
Julia Alexander from The Verge wrote a good piece about the complexities of disentangling kids and YouTube. As any parent knows, kids will go precisely where they want. Creating a single dedicated place for kids doesn’t solve the issue, we need everywhere they go to be safe. Conveniently, this is an engineering problem that has been solved before.
Twenty years ago, building a website required an actual company. Today there is a rich developer ecosystem of platforms, tools and plug-ins that make it 100x easier to create apps, sites and services (for grown-ups).
Building apps or services for kids (or which might be used by kids) is a very different experience. Speak to any children’s app developer and they’ll tell you about the ongoing challenges of explaining kids privacy requirements to analytics platforms, monetization providers and plug-in owners. Björn Jeffery has an excellent list of things which need to be solved.
While the kidtech space (developer tools designed specifically for children’s privacy and safety) has grown from a cottage movement to a genuine sector with real scale, there has been virtually (possibly literally) zero investment in this area from any major technology company.
One company can’t solve for children. But empower developers and we can fix this. A kids’ internet needs a kidtech ecosystem.
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