In this newsletter: Premium streaming programming strategies, YouTube nursery rhyme IP, creators, Ozzy Fox, Little Margo Stories, Bluey’s billions, and thoughts on YouTube’s recent Partner Program changes and UX decluttering.

Everyone’s saying that YouTube is becoming TV, but I have news for you… TV is also becoming YouTube (and by TV I mean streaming). I have receipts on both fronts in today’s newsletter but first, a public service announcement…

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So how is TV becoming YouTube?

Most folks will point to vertical video, but I remain deeply skeptical about premium streaming’s efficacy with such a UGC medium. In anways, for kids content there’s plenty of non-notional progress that’s being made. I started pulling on this thread a few weeks ago:

In fact, I’ve been speaking about the kids YouTube creator-to-Netflix pipeline for a while.

YouTube kids IPs are majorly finding their feet on premium streaming platforms.

For Netflix, this includes creators like Ms. Rachel, Mark Rober, Danny Go! and Salish & Jordan Matter, but let’s not leave out animated IP. CoComelon was the OG GOAT but there’s still plenty happening here with IPs like Sheriff Labrador, José Totoy and Plim Plim – The Kindness Hero finding their place.

But Netflix aren’t alone. Disney have also been exceptionally busy…

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If your company would like to get news out, please reach out to me to explore sponsorship.

Nielsen dropped their half-year roundup for US streaming content this week across TV series and movies… and the top 5 kids shows in the US are:

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Bluey, SpongeBob and Gabby’s Dollhouse have been in this Nielsen ranking for years. PAW Patrol and Ms. Rachel are newer entries from 2025. PAW Patrol branched out to Netflix from Paramount+, Ms. Rachelbranched out to Netflix directly from YouTube. Netflix’s superior household penetration bolstered both from a franchise perspective and all boats rose with the tide.

All five shows are displaying remarkable staying power too. Barely down from 2025 numbers. SpongeBob is up in fact, and as well as being #3 with kids 2 – 11, it was also #2 with adults 18 – 34, underscoring how legacy animated comedy is emerging as true comfort TV viewing for Gen Z.

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Ms. Rachel is also worth unpacking due to her performance on such an unbelievably small content volume. Mathing it out, she’s doing over a billion minutes viewed an episode! That’s 7x what Bluey does! Her episodes run long though, averaging 45 minutes against Bluey’s seven, so the fairer cut is minutes viewed per minute of content available. On that basis she does around 24M to Bluey’s 21M. Still ahead, but much closer. What doesn’t close is the gap to everyone else. All the others are in the low single digit millions.

On movies, Zootopia is seeing a major renaissance following the sequel launching in theaters last year.

Zootopia 2 landed on Disney+ this March and comes out at the top of the list, lifting the original to #3. KPop Demon Hunters continues to shine, joined by another Sony movie, GOAT. Finally Swapped, the latest Netflix animated movie, also shows good legs following its premiere in May.

What’s more alarming, though, is the decline of Moana. The original and sequel generated a combined 11B minutes in H1 2025, falling to just 4B in this most recent period, a 64% drop. Some decay was inevitable after the sequel’s streaming launch, but the now 2-soon-to-be-3-movie franchise is generating less viewing than the original film sustained on its own in previous years. And that was when there was no new content or news to provide an additional boost. Yet another kick in the face after the terrible box office for Moana live action, which would have been actively marketed during this period.

The key question is, what is actually new and original in this dataset? Ms. Rachel came from YouTube. KPop Demon Hunters and GOAT came from Sony. Most other top titles have been going concerns for years. Is the only fresh energy available outside the major incumbents? The platforms own the pipes but the original ideas are coming from elsewhere. If even Disney are fumbling their new(er) franchises, the pipeline problem is worse than it looks. Catalogue is holding, but how long can that last?

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If your company would like to get news out, please reach out to me to talk about sponsorship.

Reports of linear television’s demise HAVE NOT been greatly exaggerated. If you ever needed a chart to sum that up, here it is. US kids channels’ TV viewership over the past decade. It’s grim. It’s definitive. This was lifted directly from a paper I worked on with the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement. We’ve spent the last year looking at the realistic state of play of today’s kids media landscape.

If linear is dead, then where have the kids gone? We know that the slack has been taken up to some extent by premium streaming, but YouTube has been the dominant player. The real winner who’s eating linear’s lunch. Streaming wars are over, YouTube has won, and all that. There are many ways to demonstrate this. Here it is through Nielsen’s The Gauge data.

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And yet. If you look at where kids actually spend their time versus where the money follows, the math doesn’t math, as we looked at in this newsletter a few weeks ago.

Per Moonbug:

“Twenty-five percent of all screen time in North America is focused on kids and family content, but it represents only 4 percent of ad investment.”

That’s a YouTube-specific number. Kids and family content killing it in streaming, and yet the business model fails and our segment of the industry remains in crisis. Should YouTube care though? The catastrophic stalling in revenue for kids content hasn’t as much as dented their growth.

There’s a whole matrix of reasons behind that engagement and ad revenue mismatch. We covered this in the CIMM project. Together we produced a paper that looks at the shortcomings of current measurement systems and how these are impacting kids media as a whole.

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For me, it was an education on the vast machinations of the digital ad-buying ecosystem and the complex policy and legal crosscurrents that govern it. My motivation for getting involved was the hope that fixing advertising monetization would bring a solution to the kids media industry to help get more great kids content funded. CIMM and their members want better measurement, and that isn’t an abstract fix. It’s something that could actually make a difference to the bottom line of kids and family producers.

COPPA sits right at the center of this. It’s vital legislation. Keeping children’s data safe online isn’t up for debate. In practice, though, even the idea of COPPA has made a lot of advertisers switch off from kids content altogether before they’ve properly understood what’s actually permitted.

You can read more about the project here, here or here:

The key thing that stood out for me in all the research and discussion was the lack of data accuracy generally. One study shared by Truthset showed that datasets trying to flag “households with children” are less than 50% accurate on average. You’d be better off flipping a coin.

CIMM and their members are now actively collaborating to find a way through this. Studios, platforms, measurement companies and agencies. Folks like Moonbug, Precisify, Kidoodle, Warner Bros. Discovery and WildBrain. I’m reassured by the people involved and the momentum their collaboration represents.

And I’m glad that the intended outcome of the process is to actually solve the problem rather than simply point it out. Will the linear heyday ever return? Unlikely. But we’re at market failure in kids media and this is one thing that might actually make a difference.

If your company wants to get involved with CIMM, give me a shout and I can make the intro.

Netflix’s latest data dump hit last week and the industry finally copped on to something this newsletter has been talking about for the last 12 months: creators are doing huge business on Netflix. Clock it, clock it. Even Ms. Rachel clocked it!

Yo, can someone send this newsletter on to her team, please? Ms. Rachel, we’ve been singing about your success in detail here, for the past year!

So yes, creators are doing huge business on Netflix, but this runs deeper than you think. We’re going to get into that in a second. There were a few other key stories in the data related to kids media that we’ve now debriefed to clients including:

• PAW Patrol keeping the top spot

• Teen Titans Go! seeing an engagement surge thanks to a Netflix US window, demonstrating the potency of the Cartoon Network catalogue

• Sesame Street’s new approach on Netflix

• More signals in the build of animated movies

The team are now immersed in full analysis, and we will be sharing the next edition of the Netflix Kids Content Performance Report in a few weeks. If your company is interested in coming on board, please drop me a line (emily@ehorgmedia.com). In the meantime, let me sing, yet again and in deeper detail, about how YouTube kids content is killing it on Netflix.

It all started with CoComelon. Love it or loathe it, the advent of CoComelon hitting Netflix in 2020 demonstrated the massive engagement potential YouTube-originated kids content, non-exclusively licensed, offered premium streaming services. Fast-forward to Netflix’s first data dump in 2023, and the most surprising takeaway I had was that four out of the top 10 shows on Netflix were YouTube originated. A lot has changed since then, the monster engagement of the pandemic has receded, but as we know, this strategy is very much in play at Netflix.

It’s individual creators that have been driving the recent wave of attention. Ms. Rachel has redefined what a breakout looks like for a kids IP on Netflix. A top 10 series each half since she launched at the start of 2025. Nearly 600M View Hours in 18 months on just 3 hours of content. And everything tells us that Ms. Rachel is an english language centric, makes sense when you think of the subject matter. So she’s delivering this performance on a small number of (albeit key) markets.

The rest followed, which I’ve spoken about in recent newsletters: Mark Rober, Danny Go!, Salish and Jordan Matter. Different creator flavors across demos, all lining up as success stories on Netflix. These all see more universal uptake globally.

But what ever happened to YouTube animated IP? IP like CoComelon? Has it fizzled into irrelevance? Absolutely not. Let me tell you about the second biggest animated YouTube show currently on Netflix that nobody’s ever heard of:

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Netflix converted from the Church of Subscriptions to the Church of Engagement 18 months ago. They did this in their typical disruptive way, flipping the status quo of the industry and publishing engagement metrics for content on their platform; hymn sheets, the industry sang along, but lately there’s been a change in the tune.

Engagement concerns, second-season slumps. All perfectly quantifiable in the materials Netflix gave us. Fingers were pointed back at the streamer. But last night at earnings it was revealed that there are in fact three deities in Netflix’s Engagement religion: Quality, Variety and Quantity. The first two are new, the latter you know.

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• Quality: Netflix define this as how much members enjoy or love a title. That love often applies to the big-swing, marquee streaming series, but it is also broader than scale, budget or prestige; for example, animated movies were also specifically called out in this, more on that in a moment.

• Variety: Content that performs a range of different jobs. Live sport drives acquisition, advertising, and conversation. Video podcasts bring incremental daytime and mobile viewing. The French TF1 deal adds a level of local breadth and utility that could make Netflix feel indispensable in that market. Variety is less about genre and more about function.

• Finally, Quantity: The raw amount of content watched on Netflix. The View Hours we have all been trading in for the last few years. Quantity still matters, but Netflix now want us to understand that it is only one part of the picture.

As Greg Peters put it:

“There is not a linear relationship between view hours and revenue and profit because all hours are not created equal. All hours don’t provide the same kind of value to the business.”

Analyst Rich Greenfield asked whether the Netflix flywheel was broken. This answer seems to say it’s flywheels, not flywheel. But ultimately, all these questions about content investment lead back to a very Hollywood answer to the problem: spend more, make more, acquire more. As I explored in my latest newsletter, that risks treating the symptom rather than fixing the underlying tech-related issue.

Kids Headlines:

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Kids and family content was very much front and center. We even got some remarkably juicy detail on the economics of family animation including: 1) clear evidence that it overdelivers and 2) a rare indication of how much the streamer is spending on it. The kicker is that:

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Thanks to all paid subscribers who came out yesterday for the Netflix earnings primer webinar. The discussion got me thinking about some of the challenges facing them ahead of earnings tomorrow, ultimately resulting in this bonus edition of the newsletter. You’ll still get my full reaction from earnings on Friday. So here you go…

It’s the morning after the night before, and Netflix has a headache. From a corporate perspective, they partied hard with that Warner Bros. acquisition. Looking down the barrel of an $82 billion deal isn’t for the faint-hearted. At the very end, Netflix came to its senses and sensibly got an Uber home, so why has it woken up with this banging head?

Like with all hangovers, this is Netflix’s own fault. They pivoted the strategy behind their corporate storytelling to focus on content engagement over subscriber growth. They kind of had to because they were reaching a ceiling on the latter. But they did this in their typical disruptifying way, by flipping the script on a sacrosanct industry status quo. They opted to openly disclose their engagement metrics. Like publicly. Like to everyone. And smart people paid attention, and now those metrics say that Netflix might have an IP problem. The very IP problem some say would have been solved by the acquisition of Warner Bros. And that might be true to a certain extent but it’s a very Hollywood answer to the question.

“Season 2 Crisis”, “Sophomore Slump”, call it what you like. This is this week’s Netflix narrative, and it’s not a great one to be bringing into their Q2 2026 earnings round and the drop of their next data dump. The truth is in the numbers. Netflix knows that; they disclosed them. But is it just an IP problem? People are also pointing fingers at the binge release model, the limited episode volume of a streaming “season” and extended gaps between seasons. These bear some of the burden, but ultimately this is also because discovery in premium streaming is broken and the kids segment has been fighting against all of these factors for years.

In kids TV, a hit isn’t typically built in 28 days. Back in “the old days” it was 28 months if you were lucky. In the middle of that was a machine of programming strategy. Launch the series in a dedicated slot with lower volumes. Build to a weekday and then a full-week slot. Marathons at the weekend. Doubles, sometimes triples. Different time slots and dayparts. A toolbox of content discovery options and alternatives thrown out with the bathwater in premium streaming.

This is water we’ve been trying to push uphill for kids TV since the dawn of the streaming wars. How to be discoverable. To stay “above the fold” when there are 18,000 titles to contend with. Corporate media thought the almighty algorithm would save all, and so did Netflix. But all they’ve ended up with is platforms that are populated rather than programmed. YouTube, on the other hand, has always had the best of both worlds. That invasively instinctive algorithm powered by Google’s mighty data stack, but overlaid with programming, which people often forget. Each successful channel on YouTube is actively programmed. The person or team behind it is fully accountable for their own audience; it’s what they live or die by. And that’s why YouTube has never had an “IP problem”.

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Which is exactly why the most interesting thing Netflix has done in the last year isn’t a season 2 of a marquee premium series, it’s poaching the discovery problem’s own solution. Ms. Rachel, Mark Rober, Danny Go, Salish & Jordan Matter. Four creators who’ve already done the hard, unglamorous work of building an audience, now sitting inside Netflix’s walled garden. But the hangover is that Netflix aren’t cracking discovery with this; they’re renting folks who already have. But renting doesn’t tend to be a long term strategy.

Hangovers are infinitely survivable. But that type of bad habit behaviour might be telling Netflix something important. Rather than go full Hollywood and use Warner Bros. or an ever increasing commissioning budget to expensively paper over some pipeline cracks, they should do what they do best and disrupt. Truly unlock discovery. Figure it out. Fix it.

We can see early signs of this in kids, through the introduction of playlists and the expansion of the Trending Top 10. But the creator-to-Netflix pipeline is still another bandage over the real problem in premium streaming: discovery. Solve discovery within your own platform and you have far less need to spend heavily buying, or indeed renting, somebody else’s IP.

This is the last call for the webinar we’re running for paid subscribers next Tuesday, July 14^th at 4pm BST. This will be a primer for the next round of Netflix earnings, and their next data dump, which happens on July 16^th. Netflix have been making a lot of noise about how important the Kids & Family segment is to them. If you want the inside scoop, become a paid subscriber and join us:

www.ehorgmedia.com/webinar

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A couple of newsletters back I promised you a spotlight on Australia’s kids TV wins, after a video decrying its national ROI on Bluey as an IP went viral.

Charlie Gearside lambasted Australia’s ambition and I have to say I didn’t agree with all of it because Australia has a lot to celebrate when it comes to kids IP.

If my personal love affair with Australian kids TV started with Skippy…

My professional one started with H2O: Just Add Water…

The escapades of Rikki, Cleo and Emma were enough parts drama to nearly feel like Neighbours, and enough parts fantasy to keep it whimsical. Add in the Aussie lilt (“Nauuurrr”), alongside gorgeous, sun-drenched scenery. The series was just good.

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That Aussie kids content connection is one of the reasons why I’ve agreed to take up the invitation of the Australian Children’s Content Summit this August. Please reach out if you’re going to be there and fancy a chat.

We also spoke to the OG Aussie kids franchise, The Wiggles, on the Kids Media Club Podcast last year.

The children’s music group formed back in 1991. They saw success first at home, and then abroad. 35 years of success has of course had its challenges. They’ve kept their line-up fresh, continuously engaging with household names, from Dolly Parton to Ms. Rachel, from Michelle Obama to Khloé Kardashian. They’ve also stayed relevant for kids and families today by adopting new platforms, like TikTok and YouTube.

Speaking of YouTube, The Wiggles sang so Bounce Patrol could dance. The Melbourne five piece launched in 2013 and now holds the title of Australia’s most subscribed YouTube channel outright, sitting north of 30 million subscribers with tens of billions of lifetime views. Similar playbook as The Wiggles in some ways, music-driven, catchy, built for repeat viewing, but native to the platform from day one rather than adapted onto it.

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One more, sitting at the forefront of both YouTube and gaming, is Spawnpoint Media. They have built a whole narrative world out of Minecraft. It started with gaming YouTuber, EYstreem, expanding out to proprietary characters Milo & Chip. Episodes are mainly animated through Minecraft gameplay, a format that kids love to watch along to. I love this approach of using a native YouTube format (gaming watch along videos) to develop and launch proprietary IP. It’s so smart. I’ve seen it work across a few different formats.

And then there’s Bluey, of course. An industry veteran once asked me if I’d heard of it. Mate, I’m probably 20,000 words deep in it by now. The beacon of light, poster child of kids TV. The biggest streaming show in the US. The local dog that’s taken over the world. A minted household franchise for years to come. This is local gone global in the best sense, but I want to tell you about another great Aussie kids show.

Little Lunch only came onto my radar in the last few years. My obsessive Netflix creeping revealed that kids across Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand all share the same dry sense of humour. Little Lunch, a one and done live-action mockumentary set in a primary school playground at recess, was trending in all of these markets at once.

It first aired on the ABC back in 2015, Grade 5 kids narrating their own dramas straight to camera with all the seriousness of a war correspondent. There’s no denying that it’s aged brilliantly, a decade later still finding new audiences. This didn’t go unnoticed, of course; Little Lunch: New Class has been announced for 2027, produced by the ABC and BBC. This speaks to another trend I see in the market, where underexposed or underleveraged great IP can find ways to come from behind and push through.

So there’s plenty to celebrate Down Under. As a fellow patriot of a commercial B-tier English-language market, fighting to cut through the US and UK waves, you’ve done a lot, Australia! No surprises that you’ve managed to surf home plenty of times with a number of awesome kids hits. Some have taken over the world, and some are more quietly great. I’m excited to see what’s cooking when I’m down there next month.

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We’re running the next webinar for paid subscribers of this newsletter on July 14^th at 4pm BST. This will be a primer for the next round of Netflix earnings, and their next data dump, which happens on July 16^th. Netflix have been making a lot of noise about how important the Kids & Family segment is to them (see below). If you want the inside scoop, become a paid subscriber and join us:

www.ehorgmedia.com/webinar

Kids content is going up in the world and that is nothing new to this newsletter.

But we’ve fresh numbers in! Fresh kill! Let me cook it for you. Interesting metrics for Netflix and North America, and they’re strikingly similar. I’ll explain.

Last week Netflix announced that Kids & Family accounted for 22% of their viewing in 2025. That’s up, up, up, from the 15% they mentioned when they announced the Sesame Street deal in the early half of last year. I know this because, as you’d expect, my Netflix receipts are impeccably organized. Come to my webinar and you can see for yourself:

www.ehorgmedia.com/webinar

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Now, those who know me well will expect me to say: SHOW ME THE CONTEXT, NETFLIX. We don’t know exactly what Netflix are counting as Kids & Family. It’s entirely feasible that WWE could be in there, for example. Or teen centric shows like Wednesday that don’t actually surface in a kids profile. So, this may represent an actual upswing, a methodology change, or some combination of both.

Regardless of which, it’s clear that Netflix want to make more and more noise about owning space with this audience. And that’s smart. They already won the streaming war on subscriber volume. They pushed the whole industry to focus on scale at all costs. But that exhausted itself, it reached a ceiling, so now they’re moving focus to subscriber quality. In this, the Kids & Family audience is key; high habit, low churn. Netflix know this, which is why they’re doubling down on positioning themselves as the safe alternative to YouTube. They want to be seen as “a space parents can feel good about” putting their kids.

In the words of Lily Allen (who I saw in concert this week), “what a f*ckin line.” They’re amping this out by providing a safe, curated, no upsell gaming platform and leaving advertising completely off any kids video content. Even if you’re on ad tier, you still won’t be served ads if you’re looking at kids content.

That moves me onto the second data point:

“Twenty-five percent of all screen time in North America is focused on kids and family content, but it represents only 4 percent of ad investment”

That’s a YouTube specific stat according to Moonbug via The Hollywood Reporter. The 25% figure is remarkably close to Netflix’s 22%, isn’t it? Another proof point that the kids and family audience delivers significant engagement value, even as the business model fails to support it. That’s the key reason our segment of the industry has reached crisis point.

There’s a whole matrix of reasons behind the engagement and ad revenue mismatch: fragmentation of the audience, the technical complexity of COPPA, appetite of advertisers to enter a contentious and regulated space, advertising’s natural inclination for scale at all costs over accuracy and quality.

The elephant amongst the reasons boils down to YouTube because, as I’ve said before, particularly for kids, streaming wars are over, YouTube has won:

YouTube is the beating heart of content availability. It’s the front page of the kids internet. Any way you slice it, in any study, in any market, YouTube is top. As Andy Donner of Common Sense Media recently put it on The Media Odyssey Podcast, the content utility of YouTube is akin to water or medication.

The utility is driven by availability, and the availability is enabled by ad sales. But why would YouTube be motivated to fix the business model when it comes to kids content, when the implementation of COPPA didn’t even dent its revenue growth?

You know what, folks; I think we have a rival for the “Most Important Chart in Kids Streaming.” YouTube has managed to grow ad revenue to $40B. At the same time kids creators saw up to 70% decline in revenues. The floor has truly rotted under the YouTube kids ecosystem. For the sake of the audience and the industry, that’s where regulation needs to come in.

We unfortunately remain in a state of crisis with no solution, but I will say this. YouTube has three distinct weaknesses:

1. This business model fallacy for kids & family content creators, as highlighted in this article

2. Regulation coming from all areas of the globe

3. The native digital understanding of Gen Z parents and their intention to make different choices for their own kids, as I wrote about last week.

It’s an opportunity ripe for one of the premium streamers to exploit and Netflix have already started making moves.

Announcement up front! We’re running the next webinar for paid subscribers of this newsletter on July 14^th at 4pm BST. This will be a primer for the next round of Netflix earnings, and their next data dump, which happens on July 16^th. Netflix have been making a lot of noise about how important the Kids & Family segment is to them, now making up 22% of all viewing, up from 15% last year! If you want the inside scoop, become a paid subscriber and join us:

www.ehorgmedia.com/webinar

There are many fires raging in kids media right now. I’ve been pretty quiet so far on perhaps the hottest one: kids social media bans and the changing shape of digital childhood. As I mentioned last week, I make it my business not to caw into conversations where I’m not adding value. So through all the furore, I’ve been staying silent and reading, reading, reading. Smart folks’ thoughts on LinkedIn. Extracts of academic papers. Transcripts of debates at places like the DCMS.

I’ve also been working in situations adjacent to this issue where I’ve been speaking to kids directly. One of the things that’ve struck me is that it’s easy to think of kids glued to phones, swiping away, like zombies to the algorithm, but that’s lazy. Kids are busy people. They go to school every day. They have families and friends who they love hanging out with. They’re scheduled hard with sports and activities. After that, media consumption across TV and social fits in or fills gaps.

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But the thing about social media spaces, platforms like YouTube and TikTok, is that, to kids at least, they’re less like passive, consumptive content hoses and more like active places and spaces where kids hang out; playgrounds. They’re part of a kid’s identity, culture and sense of humor. They enable kids to make sense of and interact with the world.

Listen, I understand and agree with arguments for social media bans that are coming globally:

• They give parents a mandate.

• The bans will impact the next wave of kids growing up as social media will be off the cards from the get-go, so these kids will never be converted. Smoking ban 101.

• It shows that governments are actually doing something meaty.

But my main worry is that bans excuse tech companies from improving and protecting these important platforms for kids. I know many share this concern. We’ve seen YouTube abdicate responsibility for decades now: “But you need to be 13 to be on here” *fingers-in-ears-la-la-la*

Politics isn’t the only current here. There are two other shifts in the landscape that are also reshaping digital childhood.

1. Societal mobilization. Gen Z are becoming the dominant cohort of parents and their early years sat 100% in the wild west of digital childhood. They know how the platforms work. They saw the content and the harms first hand. They’re native to the UX and they want to make different choices for their children. Parental pacts like Smartphone Free Childhood and Wait Until 8^th are keeping kids off phones during primary school. Sales in “brick phones” and simpler smart watches are up.

2. Technical innovation that supports sensible and alternative media choices. For example, audio players like tonies® and Yoto are enabling kids to have fully independent autonomy over what they might like to listen to. I had this when I was a kid with the wonderful Fisher-Price, Inc. cassette player, below, and there was never a limit to how much I could use it.

   

   
   A generation of kids have missed out on this independent access to music and audio when it went to streaming, behind a screen. Innovative products are putting it back in their pockets in a sensible way. And they’re having success. Consumers are choosing them. Tonies recently announced targets to double forecast to €1.4 billion by 2030. When doing right by kids is also good business, it scales.

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The other thing happening is experts, tbc experts and charlatans turning up like Whack-A-Mole. There are lots of folks who really know their stuff on this and are sharing what they can in the hopes of steering the conversation positively and productively; there are well-meaning people piecing together bits of the puzzle to try to enter the conversation; and there are grifters turning up looking to capitalize and sell their own brand of snake oil.

In addition to this, I’m also seeing an explosion in content creators on TikTok and Instagram serving up scripts, tips, context and insights through the lens of “family digital coach” or “family IT support.” Explaining the UX of platforms to implement parental controls. Suggesting wording or approaches to actually talk to young people about this. Focusing on the ultimate objective: adequately equipping them to take on the highs and lows of the internet when the time comes. The irony is that as governments are trying to ban social media, social media is simultaneously offering up its own antidote.

So where are the kids in all this? I called these “important platforms for kids” because these platforms are important TO kids. They are an inescapable part of how we all live life today. Well, kids entered the chat in the form of a viral news interview on the BBC:

Stare at a wall…Indeed. Safe to say, kids are not impressed. They don’t think we’re doing the right thing, and they’re right to have reservations. Is something better than the right thing? Obviously not, but it’s better than nothing. The bottom line is that the real risk social media networks cause for kids (and beyond) should be regulated, and that all this momentum, from policy, to society, to technology itself, has to result in some sort of taming of the digital wild west. It has to be leading somewhere better.

It also means I had precisely zero time to write this week’s newsletter, which is why I drafted this in advance: an overview of helpful unpaywalled editions of The Kids StreamerSphere. Think of it as a directory of must-have industry information, and a great starting point for new subscribers.

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I’ve been writing online since 2020 . From the get go my intention was to be deliberate about it, not cawing into conversations unless I’m adding value. That’s taken me from What’s on Netflix, through to Observer.com, The Drum, Kidscreen and more. All the while I’ve been building subscribers, first on LinkedIn and then on Substack where we went paid in October 2025. That move to paid was to support the quality of insights I’m investing in: that includes my own time plus a junior researcher role that lets someone coming up in the industry cut their teeth on real data, a proofreader who has been responsible for every impeccably placed em dash in The Kids StreamerSphere long before AI subsumed the idiom, and a few other smart people who help with analysis, visuals and vibes that I’m genuinely proud of.

We rely on paid subscribers to make this possible. If you value the posts, the insights, or the narratives I’m pushing for the industry, becoming a paid subscriber is the best way to support the work. I’m sincerely grateful to those of you who already have. There’s plenty of value on offer too—our second paid subscriber webinar is coming next month—and if you’ve ever wanted to pick my brain, becoming an Executive Supporter gets you an hour on Zoom to talk about whatever you like.

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That said, it also made sense to open up a selection of posts for the broader industry, so we’re all pulling in the same direction. Here they are, across four categories:

1. Must-have industry information

2. Hot takes on where the industry is headed

3. Key content trends I’m tracking

4. Unmissable case studies

1. Must-have industry information

Because you now have two clients: the commissioner and the audience…

Because the Streaming Wars are over—YouTube has won, and here’s the data…

Because we all need to understand the business of ad sales…

Because kids franchises tend to be built in 28 months, not 28 days—and that’s how patient you need to be if you want to be the next Bluey…

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2. Hot takes on where the industry is headed

Because kids media is on the ropes—and even agrees…

Because the swirling currents of policy are only going to affect us more in the coming years, amirite …

Because this is the dose of reality you need…

Because there’s a fundamental issue in streaming right now…

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3. Key content trends I’m tracking

Because kids media has never been more competitive…

Because understanding what actually performs in kids media starts with the data…

Because I’m proud of our work on the Netflix Kids Content Performance Report…

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4. Unmissable case studies

Because we need to think of new ways to build business models for kids IP…

Because there’s nuance between what’s a hit and what’s a franchise, you get two articles for the price of one here as myself and chat it out…

Because even the most adorable IP is not immune to the struggle…

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And finally, for the week that’s in it: with KPop Demon Hunters turning one year old, here’s my assessment of what the franchise is achieving and what it means for the industry.

And keeping to that theme, the takeaways from the KPop Demon Hunters directors are not to be missed. There was so much creative joy in what they presented—real soul-of-the-industry stuff.

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That’s a warm fuzzy note to leave you on. Regular service returns next week.

It all started at 12:01 a.m. on Friday, June 20th, 2025. Co-director Maggie Kang teared up in her house as she watched her movie land on the Netflix platform. What she didn’t know was the wild ride she was boarding. KPDH hadn’t been massively fanfared or promo-ed. It was a throwaway by-the-by in the streamer’s 2025 presentation at the prestigious MIFA in Annecy. Neither Netflix, nor Kang, nor the world had any idea what was coming.

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Fans embraced the movie from the get-go; the reactions on social and Spotify straight out of the gate made that clear. The industry took another couple of weeks to wake up. But as KPDH became Netflix’s most watched animated movie five weeks into its run, we were all on the same page. At 10 weeks in, it ousted Red Notice as Netflix’s most watched movie of all time. I wrote extensively about this as it unfolded—the first 90 days, takeaways from the directors, the difference between franchise wars and streaming wars, lightning in a bottle and the impact of theatrical and, most importantly, what should come next. It’s that last one I want to check in on today, because a year in, it’s a reasonable moment to look at what has and has not come to pass.

Netflix have done a great job with this movie. Netflix have done a great job with this movie. I’m very happy to be on the record to say that Netflix have done a great job with this movie. Parts of the execution sit squarely in their heartland, the PR train: well-placed appearances on late night shows and at events like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and NFL games, and a first class awards campaign even when they could probably afford to phone it in. But a lot of it isn’t in their usual repertoire. Landing a first-of-its-kind dual toy deal with both Hasbro and Mattel. Planning a multi-year animated franchise built around a single movie. Conjuring content out of nowhere whilst attempting to lock in the long-term viability of the biggest IP of the decade. People call this Netflix’s “Frozen moment,” but when the success of Frozen jump-scared Disney they could simply refocus their ample and established Disney Princess teams across promo, licensing, consumer products and retail to deploy against the newly minted franchise. Netflix had to divine those teams from the ground up in real time whilst the plane was flying.

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And though they might be breaking a sweat, it’s paying off. KPop Demon Hunters had its 51st week in the Netflix Global Top 10 this week, and although it’s down to number nine, it’s still highly likely to make it to the full 52 before it turns one—the first movie to ever do so.

Now let’s check off the “what next” list I wrote when the movie was peaking:

• Creative services support on promo production—tick.

• Program ops delivering the sing-along version for streaming—tick, and upgraded for theaters—tick.

• Derpy Tiger plush in mass retail—tick.

• October as a major moment for KPDH cosplay—tick, with the sing-along re-windowing in theaters.

• A deal with Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans—tick, sequel movie planned for 2029.

• Consumer products deals—tick, Mattel and Hasbro.

• A publishing program in place—tick, Penguin Random House.

• Gaming addressed through a standalone KPDH Roblox Experience—tick.

• Dedicated social handles—tick.

• Live concert events—tick.

Damn Netflix! You did good! Any chance you could hit me a few more paid subs given you’re lifting my franchise strategy play by play? And I’m at this moment writing the keeper-test-passing, ChatGPT-able bones of a couple of teams’ performance reviews? Help a gal out!

Oh wait, here’s the but…

Netflix have delivered plenty. But the one thing still eluding them is new content.

There’s a story told around the streaming sleuth WhatsApp groups I inhabit, of a KPop Demon Hunters short that was completed and had gone so far as to be submitted for MPA certification only to be muffled away before the end of last year. Who knows what franchise management meltdown befell that short, but the bottom line is that the gap in content has been conspicuous.

That 2029 sequel date is the stinger in all this. Four years is a long bridge to keep an audience engaged. Absolutely not impossible (the gap for Frozen was six), but you need to throw the audience a bone when a fandom is basing itself on a single movie.

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And there are plenty of threads to pull on. The HUNTR/X trio throughout the eras would all have their own stories to tell, plus there are two song fragments in the original that are calling out for extended versions: “Hunter’s Mantra” and “Jinu’s Lament.” It’s the latter that has my vote for the one that writes itself.

“Jinu’s Lament” happens around 10 minutes into the film. It’s haunting and gorgeous. A delicate first verse in the underpinning mythology of Gwi-Ma, The Demon King. Being led by Jinu, it also features fan favorite Derpy Tiger, which was another play from my franchise strategy. An extended version of this song and story would gift the fandom something concrete and weighty, including music, whilst scratching the itch of the unfinished song. That’s easy for me to write in a Substack post of course, and harder to push through given the legend of the Demon King has potential to have major influence on the overall story world. But a delicate hand and a short runtime can do a lot. You don’t need to blow the mythology—you just need to give the fandom something to hold onto while they wait four years for the film that will. In the meantime, they’re making up their own versions anyway.

Sitting behind all of this is the theatrical question for 2029. In my initial assessment I had a three-year runway on Netflix swallowing theatrical distribution as a necessary requirement of levelling up their business. The team exceeded here too, securing those promotional windows for the original movie in Summer and Halloween of 2025 which drove chewy pocket change of $18M. Since then, there has been a full Warner Bros. of water under the bridge, and Netflix have more than mellowed their stance on theaters for Greta Gerwig’s Narnia movie, coming next year.

Mark my words, Netflix’s theatrical strategy will be in full flight by the time KPDH 2 hits in 2029. The sequel represents the North Star by which they need to navigate their cinema endeavors. It would be vandalism, both fiscal and cultural, if they flushed the movie down the streaming drainpipe. But I think they know that. The ultimate animated movie math shows the best results when you have your cake and eat it twice, first in theaters, then on streaming. We’re seeing this play out in real time right now with The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act.

One of the key stories in the last Netflix Kids Content Performance Report was the rise of YouTube creator content on the platform. It started in earnest in 2025 when Ms. Rachel landed on Netflix and promptly rewrote every benchmark we had for preschool performance on the streamer. Here’s the call I made at the time.

Later in the year, Mark Rober’s CrunchLabs arrived with a solid launch—further evidence that the YouTube-to-Netflix pipeline wasn’t a one-off experiment but something Netflix were actively building on.

That strategy has continued into 2026, with Danny Go! and Salish & Jordan Matter both joining the roster. At this point it feels like a strategy in full flow and the really interesting thing that’s building is the range. Netflix now have a creator content pipeline spanning genres and demos, and across the board it’s performing. They have done some excellent cherry-picking, going after creators who bring content that is valuable and distinct to the platform. Those creators are also backed by operations substantial enough to deliver consistently and have built audiences that are engaged and devoted rather than just large.

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In parallel, Netflix have been making other statements about what their intention is for their kids strategy. Netflix Playground, the new container gaming app for preschoolers, is free to all subscribers with no in-app purchases and no ads. And since launching their ad tier, Netflix have held a consistent position that ads are not sold against kids content. More broadly, their stated ambition is:

“to deliver more entertainment to kids in ways that parents feel good about”

I’ve said it before, but that framing is the key. It’s the opposite of what YouTube offers. As the regulatory vines advance, and Gen Z parents, who grew up in the wild west of digital spaces, rise as a dominant consumer cohort, framing Netflix as a safe, saner alternative is valuable. These parents have their own lived experience of what an unguarded digital childhood looks like and that’s informing the choices they’re making for their kids.

Those are the audiences Netflix want to own, and they’re not hard to draw when it’s a simple case of lifting the best-in-class creators through licensing deals. It’s a strategy that’s paying off and, like always, I bring the receipts.

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It was always going to be a big year for animated family films.

2026 Box Office Battle of the Studios

In theaters, it’s a two-film year for the two CGI heavyweights: Disney’s Pixar and Universal’s Illumination. Pixar went first with original IP, Hoppers, currently sitting at a respectable-for-new-IP $350M at worldwide box office. It bested its closest original competitor, Sony’s GOAT. Those aren’t, however, the legs Elemental showed back in 2023, closing closer to $500M, so respectable-for-new not good-for-new seems to be the level.

Hoppers gave itself a clean runway with that March release. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie arrived a month later from Illumination and is now cruising towards $1 billion globally. The summer puts the two studios in a direct pile-up: Toy Story 5 hits theaters June 19th, Minions & Monsters lands July 1st—mega-franchise sequels going head-to-head, one weekend apart. It’s a personal and professional case of “get your popcorn,” but what happens after the theatrical run?

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Disney’s Sequel Score Card

Thinking bigger than theaters, there’s another place we need to check. The final numbers are in for Disney’s sequel trinity: Zootopia 2 has landed on Disney+, completing the picture for US streaming. We now have the data for Inside Out 2, Moana 2 and Zootopia 2. I’ve written about this a couple of times before.

So where do we stand on which Disney sequel did best?

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One more quick shoutout. just published a genuinely brilliant deep-dive on the kids audio product space — a corner of the industry that deserves far more attention than it gets. Highly recommend:

And now on with the newsletter===>

There’s a storm raging in a stubby Down Under and I’m here for it on two fronts. Firstly, I’m headed there for the Australian Children’s Content Summit later this year. Secondly, the storm (and the stubby) refers to one of my favorite professional muses, Bluey, and one of my favorite professional lanes, the strategic commercial realities of building kids franchises today.

It all kicked off from a viral YouTube video made by the entrepreneur Charlie Gearside, spotlighting what he called “the sh*ttest deal ever”: how Bluey has become the biggest show in the world, and one of the major beneficiaries of this very homegrown Australian export is the very non-Australian BBC Studios.

Charlie’s frustrated. He wants Australia to level up in terms of entrepreneurial nous. He’s proud and patriotic and wants upside and opportunity brought back to his home turf. Literally same, Charlie! I moved back to Ireland nearly seven years ago with a similar type of agitation, so I promise you I get it. His video is provocative and persuasive, but not necessarily accurate. Hard-held facts don’t drive as many headlines as snappy simplistic framing, but in this newsletter we believe they’re more productive, so let’s get into it.

The first thing we need to get out of the way is that Australia doesn’t make $0 from Bluey. Moose Toys is the Australian company who came on board as the Master Toy Licensee for Bluey from the get-go. Aussie backing Aussie. Moose Toys had seen global success with their Shopkins brand and were willing to take a punt on our beloved blue heeler family. It was a bet that paid off and in 2021 alone we can see it drove $800M straight back into the Australian economy.

Moose Toys has used the safety and leverage of Bluey to make other bets. Cutting forward in the creator economy including deals with Mark Rober and MrBeast, plus continuing to light the fire under homegrown IP too, backing The Amazing Digital Circus. Is the professional crush I have on this company obvious yet? The Irish would kill for that type of local entrepreneurial opportunity.

And can we just have a minute for the precise bet that both Moose Toys and BBC Studios were making?

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FAST and kids. What’s the sitch? FAST is essentially digital, ad-supported, linear television. Remember linear? And its lean-back decision-free loveliness? Well, it hasn’t gone away, it’s been evolving, and FAST is part of that evolution.

It has the exact same challenges as any business model based around kids and ad sales. Don’t be fooled by their docile letters on a page: COPPA, CARU, and GDPR-K have teeth and will bite. There are also the challenges common to all content distribution platforms: delivery, discovery, cut-through.

That’s why I found it interesting to sit down with WildBrain, who have been quietly and successfully building in the FAST space. In my mind WildBrain was a YouTube provider, content creator and licensor, but having spoken to their EVP of Audience Engagement Kate Smith, I’m more convinced than ever that a big part of what they are is the evolution of the TV network. Meaning, YouTube and FAST as opposed to FTA and cable. And like with anything worth building, they got there by doing the unglamorous work first. We spoke with Kate initially on the Kids Media Club Podcast (see below), but I grabbed additional time with her afterwards to Geek with a capital G.

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Q1. How did WildBrain actually get into FAST? Was this a deliberate strategy or did you back into it?

“WildBrain has always been quite good at looking at what’s happening and trialing things and looking ahead. The luxury of having a large catalog, with non-exclusive rights on some shows, meant that we could put stuff up and test.”

It didn’t happen overnight. The dominant position WildBrain holds today on US platforms like Roku and Samsung came from being an early mover in the landscape, with an existing content infrastructure at the helm. This, and being willing to experiment before the opportunity was obvious.

“It’s grown, but we’re now in a really fortunate and unique position to have seen viewership success across lots of different brands.”

Grown indeed. Today WildBrain operates more than 200 FAST channels, with watch time increasing 46% YOY. That type of increment speaks to the building opportunity for this FAST in the US, if you can get the formula right.

One of their first successes was an opportunistic punt on Strawberry Shortcake. WildBrain held full rights, a rarity in a market where platforms and broadcasters are often guilty of camping on rights they’re not using. WildBrain pulled on the thread and grew from there.

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Q2. What does it actually take to build and sustain a FAST channel? What are the barriers that people underestimate?

The content volume requirement is the first filter. Like with any platform, you need a critical mass of episodes. FAST is 24-hour business, a hungry beast, so a known legacy catalog with a deep library is key—the baseline is 100 half-hours. Programming expertise matters too. FAST works best when it’s cherry picked by a person, not algo picked by a machine. When Family Channel wound down in Canada, WildBrain brought those programming skills directly into the YouTube and FAST operation.

“We were able to transition some of the programmers that we had on the TV side into roles in our YouTube and FAST group. There’s a different skill set around picking episodes and curating a series on a channel.”

That skill set extends beyond programming to human compliance and vetting. Every single video is reviewed before it goes live, which is fundamental to platform trust and advertiser confidence, particularly in kids and family environments.

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Q3. Single-IP channels are the model. Why doesn’t the multi-IP or collection approach work?

“FAST doesn’t operate the way YouTube does right now. It’s curated. You have a selection of options when you turn on the TV, and single-IP channels are what people are jumping into. IP like Pokémon, for example, or Grizzy & the Lemmings, where audiences are fans of the show in the first place.”

Where YouTube is discovery, FAST is a space where super-fandom comes home to roost. We all know that kids binge content, just not on corporate media’s timelines. They go through phases of avid passion for a particular show. WildBrain sees this clearly in the data: single-IP channels deliver significantly longer engagement, with average view duration of around 27 minutes.

This contrasts with WildBrain’s “hub” channel model on YouTube. Here, multiple IPs are successfully serviced under themed banners like WildBrain Kids, WildBrain Zoo and WildBrain Arcade.

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Q4. Your FAST audience is incremental to your YouTube audience. What does that tell you about who is watching?

“It tells us that FAST and YouTube are reaching genuinely different audiences. We looked at this using a mix of platform data and opt‑in research around IP recognition and viewing behavior. Like any research, it’s not perfect, but the picture is very consistent; this is incremental reach.”

Audiences are coming to FAST for different reasons. Turns out the need for a lean-back experience never went away. The industry has spent the last decade OBSESSED with algorithmic curation. YouTube cracked it, of course it did: it has the benefit of Google’s vast data infrastructure to draw from. Premium streaming platforms like Netflix and Disney+ attempted to chase the bolted horse down the hill, but the reality is they simply don’t have that depth data. The motivation to obtain the data only comes as you depend on an advertising model.

In the meantime, FAST is leveraging the good old-fashioned sliced bread approach of actually curating and programming. Premium streaming continues to resist this, and I have no idea why. Building with care and attention is something that audiences notice. It strengthens trust. Add into that handpicked, broadcast-quality ad inventory and you’re offering something much more valuable than grazing in the Wild West of YouTube. As I wrote a few weeks ago, trust seems to be emerging as a new key battleground in the environment.

“For Strawberry Shortcake, we drove similar minutes watched on FAST and YouTube in the US last year. That tells us FAST is increasingly where families are spending longer time together. Commercially, this is where FAST really shines.”

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Q5. FAST inventory is still difficult to monetize in some markets. Where does that stand and what needs to change?

“We can bring your brands safely to an audience that is incremental across those platforms—it’s a great way to start in the fragmented but valuable world of kids and families.”

Kids content historically has been slower to monetize on new platforms, and difficult to monetize from an advertising point of view overall. FAST follows the same pattern. The audiences are there, WildBrain has the data to prove that, and engagement is strong. But the market is still maturing, both in how FAST is measured and how it’s being bought and utilized by advertisers.

Their solution is a single-point-of-entry offering, one commercial relationship that covers all the bits across YouTube and individual FAST operations on more than 16 platforms. A veritable TV network for 2026.

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Q6. Where does kids FAST go in the next two or three years? And when does discovery actually work?

“Over the next few years, we believe the kids FAST winners will be channels built on recognizable IP, deep libraries and consistent programming; places families can turn on and instantly feel confident letting play.”

Recognizable IP channels are the key thing that’s working. That lean-back simplicity is another value. From an audience perspective FAST requires no login, no decision fatigue, and is free at the point of use. One area that could evolve to really ignite the offering is discovery. AI overlays on smart TVs could really impact content like FAST that has the benefit of open availability. And as we’ve already mentioned, the bottom line is trust:

“Trust is the foundation for everything that follows. Parents need confidence in the content and the environment, backed by human‑vetted programming and brand‑safe standards. That’s why effective advertising still comes down to three fundamentals: know the content, know the environment and know the impact, and why kids FAST is uniquely positioned to deliver all three.”

Rather than creating something new, FAST is actually restoring something that audiences never stopped wanting: trusted lean-back viewing.

I didn’t say it was “fucked,” I said it was “on the ropes,” Evan. Even if “sh*t bricks in 2026” WAS my New Year’s mantra.

But I’ll let it slide because one of the things that brings me great professional joy is when the kids media conversation enters the chat of the entertainment industry at large. That happened this week, as the industry’s cartographer, Evan Shapiro, dropped his kids opus in collaboration with another fantastic organization, Common Sense Media. Common Sense have my heart and my annual subscription.

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All kids media is public service media. Anyone making content for kids has a remit and responsibility to ensure it’s high quality, safe, and genuinely additive to how children experience the world. That responsibility doesn’t sit only with producers. It extends across platforms, distributors, and anyone shaping what gets seen and how it’s surfaced. In that spirit, I’m glad to see Evan and Common Sense Media put both the takeaways and the full 60-page deck out in the open, rather than behind a paywall. Get thee to thy data, folks. It’s available for free, see below link.

Media War & Peace

IT'S 10PM, DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOUR KIDS ARE WATCHING?

The Assignment…

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4 months ago · 42 likes · 9 comments · Evan Shapiro

Evan’s diagnosis of the landscape chimes with lots of my own thoughts. No shock there. As he has referenced, I spoke to him about this project a few months ago.

YouTube dominates

Kids commissioning is down

Producers must evolve

PSBs are carrying the can

Discovery is a mess

Just like Winter, regulation is coming

and my favorite:

Large streaming platforms ignore kids at their peril

Lots of the themes I touch on in this newsletter, and we speak about in the Kids Media Club Podcast.

There was one thread I wanted to pull on though, this idea of supply and demand. Evan’s framing is that demand for quality kids content is rising while supply of high-quality series is falling, largely driven by the pullback in commissioning from major platforms. That creates an obvious conclusion. If demand is there and supply is constrained, there is an upside for platforms who step in to fill the gap.

That logic holds if you are looking at the situation from an industry perspective. Not so much if you are looking at it as the audience. The industry still talks about supply as if it’s a pipeline. Shows are commissioned, produced, launched, and eventually replaced. Successful output is measured by volumes of new. That’s not how kids are experiencing the market.

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From a viewer’s perspective, the last twenty years has gifted a stunning roster of highly successful kids IPs that have constant rewatch potential from the audience aging into them. SpongeBob, Peppa, PAW Patrol, Pokémon and many more. None of these are going away. They’re compounding. Constantly pushed forward by highly effective franchise management with multi-platform distribution and discovery strategies that continually resurface the shows for new cohorts of kids. Space for new shows is limited. Taking franchise air from one of these powerhouses is hard but not impossible, and you need to shoot a very big shot. This has two implications.

Firstly, the challenge is breaking through in the landscape whilst premium streaming platforms are still figuring out the discovery toolbox. We through the apparatus of human curation out with the linear bath water and the almighty algorithm took over with the outcome that premium platforms are now populated rather than programmed. Turns out the algo didn’t have enough data, as I got into in a recent post.

Secondly, the dominance of households kids franchises reframes what success looks like for upcoming IPs. You’re competing with brands that have had years to embed themselves across platforms, products, and culture. That demands a different level of ambition/backing. This could mean dedicated franchise investment, like Gabby’s Dollhouse. It could mean grafting from the ground up on YouTube for years, like Ms. Rachel. Either way the best bet is commitment to a multi-year grind, and not an assumption that if you build your new show, they will come. That latter approach has been the fiscally irresponsible foolish privilege of both producers and platforms over the past 10 years, which is a contributing reason behind why we’re in this mess.

It’s also why we are increasingly seeing new entrants arrive on premium platforms with momentum already built elsewhere, rather than expecting platforms to generate this from a cold start.

When momentum is built upstream, the role of premium platforms changes. They aren’t the sole arbiters of what gets made and seen. Increasingly, they are validators. That is a very different position to the one they held even five years ago.

It also explains why the current pullback in commissioning, while painful for the industry, is not quite as irrational as it is often framed. It’s a correction, after many years drenched in disposable TV shows. If proven demand is walking in the door, the incentive to take repeated early-stage bets naturally reduces. It will (perhaps already has) dull commissioner instincts for IP bets that are worth taking. IPs that can be built, like Gabby’s Dollhouse, or catch fire, like KPop Demon Hunters.

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None of this is to downplay the pressure on producers. That’s the pressure that is concurrently devastating the kids media industry and kids viewing in one go. The combination of reduced commissions and strangled monetization, particularly on platforms likeYouTube, has created a hellish operating environment. Evan notes this in his diagnosis too:

Do us a favor, Evan, could you raise this with those lovely senior YouTube contacts next time you have them on a panel?

Because kids media IS on the ropes, and the more spotlight we can put on this the better. Put these in any order you like, but it makes as much moral sense as it does business sense. Kids content underpins how a generation learns and makes sense of the world. It also underpins long-term franchise value, platform retention, and the next wave of global IP. But we’re not fucked, Evan. Not yet. We still got fight. We plan to slug our way through to whatever the new normal might be. Thanks for picking up arms and joining us.

Wall Street may be panicking that Netflix are no longer growing like a rocket ship—the unhinged self-gaslighting assumption that what goes up keeps going up. But folks at the helm of the streamer sound more clear-eyed than ever. Sure, Netflix “lost” Warner and they need a few more juicy narratives to plug the market with, but the latest earnings revealed a grounded worldview and well-defined path forward. Maturity is the word. Netflix are maturing. Below, in their own words, is how they see the landscape they’re operating in (with my thoughts in brackets):

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One of the biggest surprises I had when writing the pilot independent Netflix Kids Content Performance Report was how prominent preschool YouTube IP was amongst the top performing shows. Sure, I expected the audiences for preschool to be concentrated. Sure, I already knew that CoComelon was massive, I’d been highlighting this since 2020. But it was the long tail and sheer variety of YouTube IP that caught me off guard. Look at it here, the #1 finding in our very first Exec Summary:

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I first met Gavin Lawler through a toy panel I was asked to moderate for Animation Dingle. Between the Kidscreen conference and time zones we hadn’t been able to get everyone together for a run-through, so I opted to send some prompt questions through to all participants for the purposes of drafting a running order. Here’s the email response I got from Gavin:

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Who was this guy?

We would be introduced by Chris Dicker, a creative exec I’ve chatted with for years. Over a Guinness they told me about Deddy Bears, a going-concern collectible toy line Gavin had built from the ground up. He had a strong background in this field, having founded the Irish Fairy Door Company years before. Large-scale retail buyers trusted his instinct to spot trends.

It was that instinct that led to the creation of Deddy Bears. Gav saw that weird had become fully mainstream. IPs like Wednesday, Stranger Things and, more squarely, Five Nights at Freddy’s were drawing massive audiences across an array of demos. But the toy iteration needed to be authentically weird, not corporate weird. So each individual Deddy Bear would come with its own coffin and death certificate.

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The IP launched on a wing and a prayer. Last minute budget cuts meant that Gav sold in at a loss on his first shipment, but the line sold through remarkably, making the bet worth it. Both retailer and toy maker were in business on Deddy Bears and the fandom match was struck. For the next three years it would be build, build, build. But how do you underpin a toy IP so it’s truly evergreen? That’s where Chris Dicker would come in.

In a twist in the story that’s even more Irish than the Guinness, Gav and Chris were connected because Gavin is married to Chris’s best friend’s sister. It’s a cliché but the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is truly a maximum of three if both people are Irish. We literally do all know each other. Folks who knew Gav knew that he was all in on toy and folks who knew Chris knew that he was all in on kids animation. Clear crossover.

When you’re speaking to the lads, the chemistry is clear. Gav is 1000% entrepreneurial energy. That’s what you’re seeing in the email up there. Chris fully matches that from the creative storyteller side. He could see that Deddy Bears was built and working in the market. An established brand and fandom that needed to be respected. Not a story to retrofit, but something to uncover and expand. That’s the key distinction. The job now was to understand that brand connection and build from it, rather than impose something new on top.

So where would that development take them? YouTube of course. The undeniable center of gravity for kids media. They have developed content that will be launching there this summer. A film potentially too. Chris is a heavyweight creative with an original feature greenlit by Spin Master, after all. It would be well within his wheelhouse to dream something like that up for Deddy Bears. In the meantime, a quick foray deploying animators to output for Giphy drew yet another proof point. The Deddy Bears collection has seen 9.4m views since it launched on that platform last month.

When I met Gavin and Chris over those pints in Dingle we vigorously debated about what comes first: the toy or the story? It made for good meat in the panel the next day too. This stayed on my mind, as you’ll know from my newsletter the following week:

The one thing we all agree on is that it boils down to connection. Making someone feel something. People have chosen to spend money on Deddy Bears. That’s a strong connection statement. More than a view or a rating. A profound validation that many people see themselves in the playful weirdo vibe of the IP. What Chris is now building into is not a blank slate, but a proven relationship with an audience. That changes the role of content. It’s not there to create demand from scratch. It’s there to deepen something that already exists. To build the toy line into a true franchise that can deliver for years to come.

And that has wider implications. For years, producers have been building primarily for commissioners, with the audience sitting at the end of the chain. What Gavin has done flips that sequence. The audience comes first. Find proof of audience and double down. For Deddy Bears, content is now following as a way to scale, as opposed to a greenlight Hail Mary. It’s a much more entrepreneurial way of thinking about IP, akin to what we see with digital creators. It’s a viable alternative to the traditional entertainment system.

Welcome to The Kids StreamerSphere, a regular newsletter where we look at the latest news, deals, and performance data for kids content within the context of global streaming. Comments, questions, suggestions? Please hit me up thekidsstreamersphere@ehorgmedia.com.

Also The Kids StreamerSphere and Kids Media Club Podcast are open for sponsorship! Our most valuable slots are ahead of major events, like Annecy, BLE and MIPCOM. Drop me a line if it would be handy for your organization to have a high quality, credible spotlight in advance of one of these key calendar moments.

I wanted to acknowledge up front in today’s newsletter what a catastrophic week this has been for the infrastructure of the kids media industry. On Tuesday we were dealt a two-fist blow as World Screen, including the daily TV Kids newsletter, ceased publishing, and then Kidscreen announced the end of in-person events. This sucks as real people and their livelihoods are affected. The entertainment industry is going through a profound and painful evolution, with kids media at the pointy end as usual. Everything is changing at a fundamental level: what you sell, how you sell, who you sell to. It’s scary, but change is only ever productive if you embrace it.

Alongside this upheaval, there is another shoe waiting to drop for kids as an audience and userbase in particular. Political currents are circling purposefully towards digital platforms more than they ever have before. This includes the social media age restriction in Australia, numerous court cases at play in the US, and an in-depth parliamentary inquiry underway in the UK. All these are flowing together. Right now it’s impossible to divine precisely where the waters will land us, but the only hope we have of finding our way is to follow them.

, a colleague, friend, and (most importantly) tack-sharp kids media exec, has been doing just that as it relates to the UK’s Department for Culture, Media & Sport hearings over the past few months. I’ve found her LinkedIn updates about these super helpful. So much so that I asked her to draft a summary for readers of this newsletter, to which she kindly agreed. Take it away, Jodie.

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As anyone who follows me on LinkedIn may know, I have been posting summaries of the DCMS Select Committee hearings into children’s television since November last year. Five sessions so far, and an excessive amount of time spent watching hours of Parliament Live TV.

I sort of went into it with my eyes closed, not fully realizing how many sessions there would be or how many hours of viewing I’d signed myself up for. But it’s actually been a really rewarding discipline to keep track of and digest each session.

So I was delighted when Emily kindly suggested that I write a guest blog for her most excellent newsletter, summarizing where the DCMS Select Committee has got to so far. At the time of writing, it’s not entirely clear how many more sessions are left, or when the final report might land. But with most of the key players having now provided evidence, and DCMS now turning its attentions to the small matter of the BBC Royal Charter Review, it feels like the end may be near.

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Looking back over the last 4–5 months of DCMS sessions, one thing is clear: there is zero debate that the children’s media industry is in absolute crisis. Sadly, there is much less agreement on what the solution is or what the future looks like.

Across producers, broadcasters, streamers and industry bodies providing evidence to the Committee, the same themes have come up again and again. The economics of children’s TV have become almost impossible to sustain. Production costs have risen, while commissioning budgets have been cut. BBC Children’s remains central to the system, but of course can’t fund everything on its own. At the same time, global platforms have not stepped in to replace funding of kids content in any consistent or reliable way.

Alongside this economic calamity sits the inescapable truth that the audience has moved. Children are no longer watching content on linear television in any great numbers; they are watching on YouTube, and on streaming platforms. The BBC makes the case that it is achieving huge iPlayer numbers, but the point remains: the audience is fragmented, which means the challenge is not just about how children’s content is funded, but how it is found.

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Up to this stage in the sessions, there has been a surprising amount of agreement. Different parts of the industry describe the problem from different perspectives, but the diagnosis is the same: the entire media system is under strain, and children’s television is where that strain is most visible.

Where things get really complicated is when the conversation turns to what should be done about it. This is where consensus starts to fall away and—in the case of the feisty YouTube session earlier this month—where the sessions got a whole load more interesting to watch 🍿 🍿 🍿

Jodie Morris

DCMS Select Committee - Children's TV & Video Content - Session 5 Summary

Originally posted via LinkedIn on 11 March 2026…

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5 months ago · Jodie Morris

Some contributors argue that children’s content should be considered social infrastructure—not just part of the creative economy but something that’s vital to education, wellbeing, identity and development. In this context, the Committee heard calls for public intervention: for example, a new contestable fund for children’s content, improved tax incentives, or rules around prominence so that UK content can be more easily found on the platforms where children are watching.

YouTube is central to this debate. Some suggest that YouTube, which benefits from children’s viewing in a big way, should contribute financially to the system: either through improved commercial terms for high-quality kids creators, or by directly contributing to a children’s content fund. Others have suggested it should be required to surface more high-quality, culturally relevant content. But YouTube is adamant that it is simply “the world’s largest video library,” has no role in commissioning or curating content and therefore—from what I could tell—believes it should bear no responsibility towards supporting the industry beyond providing its distribution tool.

What’s very clear is that despite a lot of insightful and sobering evidence, and some decent questioning, particularly from Natasha Irons MP (the below video is well worth a watch), there is no obvious consensus on the solution. There will never be one single silver bullet; it’s going to take a combination of things to get the industry back on its feet—all of which would take the UK children’s media sector down slightly varying paths. The tough question is: how many of us will be left working in it by the time those solutions come into effect?

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I remain on standby to report on any updates, and I look forward to the inevitable debate once the Committee publishes its findings (likely this summer) and the government responds. In the meantime, if you missed any of the session summaries, you can now find them all on my newly-dusted off Substack. Thanks, Emily, for the nudge.