Today Thursday, from Pew Research Center have released a new study called A Week in the Life of Popular YouTube Channels (a week in the life of popular YouTube channels), which shows that those videos directed at children or that show children on them, are among the most viewed content on the platform.
It so happens that YouTube is not a platform designed to be used by children under the age of 13, according to its usage policies, where even the platform itself is working to protect the minors that appear in the videos, even going so far as to argue that All videos focused on children are transferred to the YouTube Kids application, the YouTube application that is intended to be used by minors safely.
The aforementioned organization has compiled a list with those YouTube channels that had more than 250,000 subscribers at the end of 2018, and has been analyzing the videos that those channels have been publishing throughout the first week of 2019.
The study indicates that the videos where children have been included have tripled their visits on average compared to any other content published on the Google video platform.
This situation has been exploited by many vloggers to achieve an increase in visits to their videos, even if their themes are not specifically directed at minors, with the consequent increase in their advertising revenue.
A YouTube spokesperson has stated to different media that:
We can't talk about Pew's methodology or results. But generally on YouTube, the most popular video categories tend to be areas like comedy, music, sports and how
He also adds that YouTube has never been for children under the age of 13. This study will serve as an incentive for those groups that ask Google to further tighten its policies and operating rules to better protect minors on YouTube.