Kids with wildly popular YouTube channels are frequently promoting unhealthy food and
drinks in their videos, warn researchers at NYU School of Global Public Health and NYU
Grossman School of Medicine in a new study published in the journal Pediatrics.
Food and beverage companies spend $1.8 billion dollars a year marketing their products to
young people.
Although television advertising is a major source of food marketing, companies have dramatically
increased online advertising in response to consumers' growing social media use.
Kids already see several thousand food commercials on television every year, and adding these
YouTube videos on top of it may make it even more difficult for parents and children to
maintain a healthy diet.
YouTube is the second most visited website in the world and is a popular destination
for kids seeking entertainment.
More than 80 percent of parents with a child younger than 12 years old allow their child
to watch YouTube, and 35 percent of parents report that their kid watches YouTube regularly.
The allure of YouTube may be especially strong in 2020 as many parents are working remotely
and have to juggle the challenging task of having young kids at home because of COVID-19.
When finding videos for young children to watch, millions of parents turn to videos
of "kid influencers," or children whose parents film them doing activities such as science
experiments, playing with toys, or celebrating their birthdays.
The growing popularity of these YouTube videos have caught the attention of companies, who
advertise or sponsor posts to promote their products before or during videos.
In fact, the highest-paid YouTube influencer of the past two years was an 8-year-old who
earned $26 million last year.
Parents may not realize that kid influencers are often paid by food companies to promote
unhealthy food and beverages in their videos.
This study is the first to quantify the extent to which junk food product placements appear
in YouTube videos from kid influencers.
The researchers identified the five most popular kid influencers on YouTube of 2019--whose
ages ranged from 3 to 14 years old--and analyzed their most-watched videos.
Focusing on a sample of 418 YouTube videos, they recorded whether food or drinks were
shown in the videos, what items and brands were shown, and assessed their nutritional
quality.
The researchers found that nearly half of the most-popular videos from kid influencers
(42.8 percent) promoted food and drinks.
More than 90 percent of the products shown were unhealthy branded food, drinks, or fast
food toys, with fast food as the most frequently featured junk food, followed by candy and
soda.
Only a few videos featured unhealthy unbranded items like hot dogs (4 percent), healthy unbranded
items like fruit (3 percent), and healthy branded items like yogurt brands (2 percent).
The videos featuring junk food product placements were viewed more than 1 billion times--a staggering
level of exposure for food and beverage companies.
While the researchers do not know which food and drink product placements were paid endorsements,
they find these videos problematic for public health because they enable food companies
to directly--but subtly--promote unhealthy foods to young children and their parents.
It's a perfect storm for encouraging poor nutrition--research shows that people trust
influencers because they appear to be 'everyday people,' and when you see these kid influencers
eating certain foods, it doesn't necessarily look like advertising.
But it is advertising, and numerous studies have shown that children who see food ads
consume more calories than children who see non-food ads, which is why the National Academy
of Medicine and World Health Organization identify food marketing as a major driver
of childhood obesity.
The researchers encourage federal and state regulators to strengthen and enforce regulations
of junk food advertising by kid influencers.