- COPPA, COPPA, COPPA.
It's been about two months now since
this thing took effect here on YouTube.
And I'm talk with you about like where we at since then.
The thing a lot of creators were concerned about
was getting their channel demonetize,
the AI miscategorizing them
and people losing all their money and their revenue
and their in a traffic plummeting
and it was definitely spat out to be
the doomsday of everything for Youtube creators.
Well let's look at data and see what
that suggests about where we're at today.
(sound effects)
Hey, guys my name is Tim Schmoyer,
welcome to Video Creators here,
we're all about helping you grow your YouTube audience
so you can reach more people,
make more money,
grow your channel all typically
so that you can change their lives
with the message that you're spreading.
And it's really hard to do that
if the government is holding you back.
If you remember back to the end of 2019 there
was a lot of drama and hype going on about
what COPPA was going to mean for us as creators.
And it was kind of hard honestly to separate
the hype and the people who were really selling
how bad this was going to be, typically for personal gain.
Versus the people who are like,
let's just be chill here,
like let's look at the track record
and I always felt I was clearly in that camp.
And I want to be clear that now
that we're about two months into this
that it's still really early to see exactly
what's going to happen.
I don't yet know if COPPA has fully
been rolled out yet on this platform.
I don't know what parts of it are currently being enforced
and what parts aren't enforced as strongly.
So there's still a lot more than could unfold
and come in the coming months
but as of right now,
where we're at is like,
the sky didn't fall
and we're kind of still here.
And the data that I want to cover here comes
from about 40 million YouTube channels.
And encompasses around 6 billion subscribers
and around 2.5 trillion views here on the platform.
So it's a pretty decent sample size thanks
to my friends over at Social Blade.
The summary is that if your channel
is not labeled as made for kids
then from all the data suggests
that there is little to no change whatsoever made
on your channel.
Like channels like mine nothing
was impacted significantly in anyway.
And it also seems that channels that were kind of
in that gray area like, it's not made for kids
but we have a lot of kids watching,
those types of channels were they look like
those channels have been more safe
then we thought that they might have been.
The main impact we saw happened on channels
that were very clearly made for kids
for under 13 years old like,
no one's arguing or fighting about that,
everyone looks at that and you're like,
that's a nursery rhyme and an ABC phonics video
and that is very repetitious that it clearly
for a three year old.
That kind of stuff.
Now on the surface it doesn't look like much
changed over the past two months
for these made for kids channels
when you lump all the data together.
But when you start separating them into channels
with a million plus subscribers versus channels
with less than a million subscribers
then you start to see a pretty significant difference.
From what we can tell,
channels with a million subscribers or more,
or more accurately, channels that
are just more well established on the platform overall.
They saw either an increase, very little increase
in views or no dip at all.
However, channels that are not as established on
the platform in the kid's niche, those channels
saw somewhere around 12-13% decrease in views.
Now these numbers do change based
on what date range you're looking at
and which data you're comparing to what,
but overall it seems like the established channels
are still doing fine
and the ones that weren't as established are doing poor.
And so that looks like what happened
is YouTube is favoring the big guys
and they're squashing the little guys.
But I don't know if that's actually happening
and I'm going to get into some speculation here
a little bit but I think there's maybe
a couple different things happening.
One is that the new search and discovery system
that YouTube is developing for kids
is very new and it will get better over time
and I think YouTube decided to favor the content
that it already knew was safe versus
the majority of the content that they suspect
was probably fine but weren't as confident over it.
Over time I think that we'll see that
those smaller channels will start to come back
as YouTube's search and discovery system
for the kids app actually gets better.
A second thing that might be happening here
is that according to data from videoamigo.com
that also tracks a lot of the data for these channels.
They show that these smaller channels as January 1
was coming nearer they actually slowed down
with how many videos that they were publishing.
Where as the big channels with a million plus
actually ramped up production.
And they started posting more videos
and gaining more momentum for their channels heading
into the switchover for when COPPA took effect on January 1.
So it might have been that the smaller channels kind
of fell into the hype a bit more
and got a little more nervous
and like it's not worth posting
and YouTube's going to take this away
and so they got discouraged.
In terms of how revenue has been impacted
this part is getting a little bit even more speculative
because YouTube API doesn't report those numbers publicly
to people so we don't know exactly what's going on there.
But we have heard reports from channels
that are made from kids some of them saying
that their channel's revenue just tanked
that it just took a nosedive
and has yet to really return.
But we've also heard reports some made for kids channels
are like, it's just kind of about the same
or maybe it grew a little bit.
While I do appreciate hearing people's stories
and hearing what their experience has been
on the platform with a lot of these things
it's hard to make a sweeping assumption
about 172,000 made for kids channels
by just hearing a few people's stories.
You know there's this thing called the vocal minority
and so I'm not downplaying anyone's stories
but it's just hard to say for certainty that
because we've heard some negative stories
that that must therefore be the case
for everyone in the group.
And remember that the kids space on YouTube
is very lucrative for the company as a whole
so if you're not getting paid
as much as you used to be
that means YouTube is also not getting paid
as much as they used to
and they are very motivated to make sure
that this grows, revenue comes in
and so we're just kind of in like this is,
no pun intended, infancy stage right now
of YouTube's new discovery systems for kids.
As it continues to mature and grow
and they continue to learn and tweak them over time
I have full confidence that we are going
to come right back to where we were
if not even better sometime in the future.
If you have a YouTube channel that designated
as made for kids I would love to hear from
you in the comments down below what
your experience has been like so far.
Also share down there what your expectation
for COPPA was versus how that compares to
what actually is happening now in
these first two months on your channel.
So I'm looking forward to reading everything
you guys have to say,
interacting with you guys,
learning from you.
Thank you each of you for being a part
of this amazing community here at Video Creators
and I will see you guys again in the next video.
See you then, bye.