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. If you would like to support my work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
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:
