It’s been about two weeks since YouTube rolled out the COPPA restrictions across the platform where creators need to pick either on the channel or video level whether their content is made for kids or not. As this happened in January, the worst month for ads in general, it’s hard to fully tell just how big of an impact this is to creators in terms of earnings from their videos as they are losing personalized advertisements, but we were interested to see what these changes would do regarding views and subscribers.
For this study we were thankful that YouTube provided a flag when we request data for channels indicating if at the channel level they were made for kids or not. You can see the top list of made for kids channels here or if you look up any channel on our website there is a pink badge on their profile that says Made for Kids if the channel is fully made for kids.
To further clarify the above paragraph, if a channel has decided to declare their content as made for kids on the video by video level they do not get this flag (as far as we know at this point) and are not included in this study. It is likely that the number of kids channels NOT included in this study is sizable, just at this point not as easily detectable.
Now to look at the changes that happened in terms of subscribers and views we looked at the average number of views/subs the channels got in various time periods, 7 days, 14 days, 60 days, and 90 days. We compared the MFK channels to the entire database as well to see if a trend was specific to the kids channels or across the platform. We also compared channels of various sizes, 1+ million subscribers, under 1 million, and the group as a whole. Also it should be noted that due to YouTube abbreviating subscriber counts in Sept this can cause weird bumps in subscriber gains but when you look at the ecosystem as a whole it should average out but the longer the time period the more accurate the number would be.
One last thing to note when reading these findings, if the 7 day number is higher than the 14 day number it means a positive change is occurring, the rate of growth is faster in the 7 day period than the 14 day period.