10 Years Ago This Week: YouTube Creates a place for Kids

To celebrate 10 years of Creator Weekly, I’m sharing tech highlights from 2015 that still resonate 10 years later. This update was for the week ending February 22, 2015.

On February 23, 2015 YouTube launched YouTube Kids.

This was “the first Google product built from the ground up with little ones in mind. The app makes it safer and easier for children to find videos on topics they want to explore”.

There are parental controls, a timer, and limited search. YouTube Kids only shows approved family-friendly ads.

I think this was the first acknowledgement that there is specifically content aimed at kids on YouTube, or at least content that kids were watching.

Since then YouTube Kids expanded to more countries, and has more controls.

They also set up an advisory committee of independent experts to "weigh in on products, policies and services [YouTube] offer[s] to young people and families."

In August 2019 the YouTube Kids website launched, so that parents would not have to limit kids the mobile app.

They also allowed parents to set an age range for their kids, since what's inappropriate for a 4-year-old might be fine for a 11-year-old. And preteens would probably find videos aimed at pre-schoolers boring.

The COPPA Settlement

It was noted that the launch of the YouTube Kids website was very shortly before a highly anticipated settlement with the FTC.

The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) is a US law that requires parental consent to collect personal information about children under the age of 13.

YouTube and Google paid $170 million dollars for violating COPPA by tracking children who were watching videos on the main YouTube site.

One of the issues was that YouTube manually reviewed content for the YouTube Kids app, so they knew that content aimed at kids was available on the platform. But they served targeted advertisements on that content on YouTube.com. Those ads collected personal information "in the form of persistent identifiers that are used to track users across the Internet" (aka cookies).

YouTube also started treating all content clearly aimed at kids as if a child is watching.

New polices required creators to label any content aimed at children, and that "made for kids" content would have limited features. That means no comments, no notifications and no personalized ads.

There has been some confusion about that because not all content available in the YouTube Kids app is necessarily "made for kids".

Since then also put policies in place so that “low quality” kids content was less likely to be recommended, and could not be monetized.

But it's an ongoing issue, because kids want to watch videos that aren't necessarily aimed at them, or even kid-friendly.

What about the future?

There have been proposals that Google (for Android) and Apple (for iOS) verify the age of device users, and then limit the installation to age-appropriate apps.

While this is probably easier (and less a privacy problem) than requiring every app and service to verify each user's age, it's not a perfect solution.

Interestingly, in the announcement of YouTube’s big bets for 2025, they announced they are working on this, using (of course) "AI".

And that's why we'll use machine learning in 2025 to help us estimate a user’s age – distinguishing between younger viewers and adults – to help provide the best and most age appropriate experiences and protections.

It’s not clear how well that will work, but that’s the future.