“It’s literally like crack for her,” says her mom Meng Zhou at their home in Redwood City, Calif. “It” is CoComelon, which may be the most streamed children’s entertainment program in the world. The show was watched for 33 billion minutes last year, more than the Netflix hits Squid Game and Bridgerton combined (View Highlight)
CoComelon is not only a ratings juggernaut. It’s also a model for a new approach to children’s TV. (View Highlight)
“Data is really at the heart of everything we do,” says Richard Hickey, Moonbug’s head of creative. “With YouTube, you’ve got an audience there that literally tells you whether they want to watch something or not, in real time.” (View Highlight)
Considering the needs of babies is a new thing in kids’ TV. Before screens were ubiquitous, most families had just a television or two, and children’s shows were geared toward a broad age group. (Sesame Street, for instance, was targeted at 3-to-5-year-olds but watched by a wider spectrum of kids as well as their parents.) When parents started having phones in their pockets, entrepreneurs realized they could make shows for even smaller kids and still get millions of viewers. (View Highlight)
Every Monday, CoComelon puts out a new episode on YouTube, often experimenting with new characters, music, or story lines. Within the next few days, Moonbug’s data-insights team in London has crunched the numbers to suss out what did or didn’t work. If an element resonates, the creative team will try more of it. If it doesn’t, they move on to something else. The upshot is that viewers of Moonbug’s programs on platforms like Netflix are getting content that has already proved successful with a large audience. (View Highlight)
Shows like Sesame Street or The Electric Company have curriculums developed by pediatricians, says Dimitri Christakis, director of the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development at Seattle Children’s Research Institute. They rely on metrics that show whether a children’s series is educational. While CoComelon may look that way to parents because it has words highlighted on the screen and tackles concepts like “left” and “right,” those ideas aren’t actually accessible to little kids in the process of learning language. “It’s one of those shows that is designed for parents to think they’re educational,” Christakis says, “but it doesn’t strike me as being high-quality at all.” (View Highlight)