From Wired:
Kids love YouTube. They love the pinging of the xylophones in the upbeat “Thank you song” on CoCoMelon, a channel with more than 53 million subscribers that plays animated nursery rhymes. They love watching other kids open and test toys, as they do on Ryan ToysReview (subscriber count: 20,749,585). And they love the Baby Shark song. Possibly because of the fun dance moves and possibly because they want to drive adults crazy.
These trends are nothing new, but now we have more than vast subscriber counts or astounding click numbers to illustrate just how central videos featuring kids are to the platform. In a report Thursday, the Pew Research Center said that in the vast ecosystem of YouTube’s English-language videos, children’s content and content featuring kids under 13 are some of the most popular videos on the site.
For the study, researchers analyzed the videos posted by 43,000 YouTube channels, each with more than 250,000 subscribers, during the first week of 2019. There was a lot to work with. In those seven days, these channels posted almost a quarter-million videos totalling more than 48,000 hours. For the record, the authors note, “a single person watching videos for eight hours a day (with no breaks or days off) would need more than 16 years to watch all the content.”
Those videos covered everything from politics to video games. Most were not intended for kids. But the most popular featured kids. Researchers found that just 2 percent of the videos they analyzed featured a child or children that appeared to be younger than 13. “However, this small subset of videos averaged three times as many views as did other types of videos,” says the report.
There have been studies of niche communities within YouTube, but “We hadn’t seen something like this done before,” says Aaron Smith, director of the data lab team at Pew. Although YouTube children’s content wasn’t the impetus for the study, Smith says the results weren’t surprising: “We had a sense that this kind of content would be fairly popular. We know that lots of parents let their kids watch videos on YouTube.”
Videos with cheery, if nonsensical, titles like “Funny Uncle John Pretend Play w/ Pizza Food Kitchen Restaurant Cooking Kids Toys,” and “No No, Baby Rides the Scooter!” racked up over 6 million views each. “SUPERHERO BABIES MAKE A GINGERBREAD HOUSE SUPERHERO BABIES PLAY DOH CARTOONS FOR KIDS,” attracted almost 14 million views.
Not all the videos that featured young kids were nursery rhymes or traditional kids content like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Pew’s analysis found that only 21 percent of videos featuring children appeared to have been aimed at kids. But videos that were both aimed at kids and featured kids were the most popular videos in Pew’s analysis, averaging four times as many views as other “general audience” videos.
As for the other 79 percent of videos that had kids but weren’t directly aimed at children? They did better too, getting “substantially more” attention than other videos aimed at teens and adults. The five most popular videos from the week Pew studied included a baby name reveal and family vlogs with titles like “WELCOMING A NEW MEMBER OF FAMILY!!” One was a sliming video. None are immediately alarming, though Smith couldn’t comment on why that kind of content was so attractive to so many viewers. “Why that type of material pops is unclear to me,” he says. “Someone clearly is enjoying it but it’s not clear who those folks are or what their motivations are for doing that.”
Link to the rest at Wired
PG’s general impression is that the videos that traditional publishers post on YouTube to promote books look cheap and are lame. The ones he recalls had very few viewers at the time he checked them.
However, he wondered if any authors have popular YouTube channels that play a significant part in the promotion and marketing of their books. Feel free to point out examples in the comments.
PG is particularly interested in productive YouTube channels from authors who are not megaseller/JK Rowling, etc., authors.
Oh boy. Am I missing something here?
**You HAVE to be 13 years old to post content to Youtube (or Twitch for that matter). **
I don’t understand why it’s not mentioned in the article – and in fact, the researchers completely overlooked this, apparently. (As an aside – THIS is why you have to investigate the source material of basically every survey/”research finding” ever made.) But, the connection between the fact that the EULA or terms of service for Youtube **completely dis-allow a 12 year old (or younger) child from posting content** and the fact that the rarity of said content would cause that which IS posted to become more popular – would seem to be painfully obvious.
To quote from the source of the article: [“YouTube insists that the platform is not intended for children. “We can’t speak to Pew’s methodology or results. But generally on YouTube, the most popular video categories tend to be areas like comedy, music, sports and ‘how to’. And we have always been clear YouTube has never been for people under 13,” Ivy Choi, a YouTube spokesperson, says via email.”]
I need to repeat this. You HAVE to be 13 years old to post content to Youtube (or Twitch for that matter). It’s not just not intended for 13 years old and above – they prohibit content non-incidental content completely.
As a parent of a newly minted teenager that wanted to stream and post content, I’m very familiar with those age restrictions – and they’re there to both protect the kids from themselves (and predators) but no doubt to protect Youtube as well.
There is no YT verification of age — other than the poster SAYING he/she is 13 or older. Very easy for a kid or tween to lie about age, so also very easy for them to post stuff to YT.
YT’s “13 or over” rule is a joke.
I create YouTube relationship advice videos for widowers and those who are dating them. I don’t market my books directly via the videos but have seen a 30% lift in sales since I started the channel. It’s a niche market but I have enough subscribers and views that I can monetize the channel too. Check out Dating a Widower at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpXeMMk-_IcJMLVQwND4zHw
Fiction is a whole different ball game that I don’t think many authors have mastered.
Shadiversity/Shad Brooks. (No relation, I’m just a fan.)
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkmMACUKpQeIxN9D9ARli1Q
https://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Conqueror-Chronicles-Everfall-Book-ebook/dp/B07TB4YSHX/
The amiable Aussie has spent the last several years building up his Youtube channel to nearly 700k subscribers, focusing mostly on applying historical and scientific viewpoints to sci-fi fantasy pop culture topics.
He just released his debut novel (self-published epic fantasy, simultaneous ebook/POD/audio release) and I was holding my breath for him because from the comments on his channel, it sounded like 80% of his audience are youngsters who probably don’t have credit cards or Amazon accounts.
I was extremely pleased to see his book take off to a fantastic start, especially as it’s priced at $9.99. I think he got to sub-1000 in the Kindle rankings at one point, though now it’s at #8400. But between the ebook and the audio, I bet he’s made out just fine even though there’s nothing else for his fans to go and buy yet.
Can’t remember the guy’s name now–I think he writes epic fantasy–but he talked about his YouTube channel with subscribers in six figures.
Unfortunately, he was putting up videos talking about Marvel and DC superheroes, and he discovered that they did not buy his books.
He dumped that channel and turned to personal / writing stuff, and has a lot lower popularity as a result.
The only person who might have monetized his viewership is Yahtzee Croshaw, an acerbic British bloke who reviews video games at Zero Punctuation. He has a couple novels out and their subjects align with his profession.
Books, I’m not sure, but to promote Video Games, Youtube is vital.
You’ve heard of Pokemon Go? It’s a game for your phone where you walk around and ‘find’ pokemon in the “real word” – by the side of the street there will be a pikachu, or whatever, and you see it on your phone and ‘capture’ it, etc, etc.
These are called “augmented reality” games. Microsoft is rolling out “Minecraft Earth”, where you can build minecraft structures at various points in the real world and see them if you point your phone (running the game) at that point.
So here’s an assignment. Go to Youtube.com and search for Minecraft Earth.
See all the hits? Well, people just looking for Minecraft videos in general also see these hits, and they open the videos and they get sold.
Book videos can do the same thing. Find some way to link an aspect of your book to a more common search term in Youtube. Your video, should you have one, will be in those results.
IMO, a video wouldn’t even need to be super-produced or anything. Point your phone at yourself and read part of the first chapter – it’s what would be done at a book reading at a bookstore. It’s all free. What do you have to lose?
Time and effort?
Comic books and movies are also big on Youtube but its because like the game channels their channels cover industries, not specific releases. Search might surface a specific video but the subscriptions is where youtubers live. Like broadcast TV they depend on repeat business: Youtubers make their money via eyeball concentration and donations. The successful ones rack up views by the tens and hundreds of thousand. And donors by the hundreds. Maybe a couple thousand, if good and lucky.
The youtube–book “problem” is that there is no broad vlog channel for books, as opposed to history, technology, science, games, or even trivia. That means any ads or videos would end up attached to random videos aimed at a different audience.
And because of that, it is far from tbe best medium for book ads. I’d be shocked to see any large population of authors getting good results off youtube ads or content.