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| Bravo for Little Baby Bum on YouTube – enjoy it while it lasts | Bravo for Little Baby Bum on YouTube – enjoy it while it lasts |
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| Little Baby Bum is now the fifth-largest channel on YouTube. A Guardian piece last week argued that the channel is noteworthy because it’s run by a married set of parents, consists entirely of nursery rhymes, and has the word “bum” in the title. | |
| The quiet success of Little Baby Bum has reached extraordinary, near-Gangnam Style heights with its biggest video, The Wheels On The Bus (Plus Lots More Nursery Rhymes), closing in on half a billion views. The channel puts out one video a week, is aimed at people who can’t talk, and regularly pulls in more than 300m views a month. | The quiet success of Little Baby Bum has reached extraordinary, near-Gangnam Style heights with its biggest video, The Wheels On The Bus (Plus Lots More Nursery Rhymes), closing in on half a billion views. The channel puts out one video a week, is aimed at people who can’t talk, and regularly pulls in more than 300m views a month. |
| As someone who both works on YouTube and has two young (ish) children, I have nothing but admiration for the work on this channel. Yes, I find the animations insipid, but its success rests on two specific strokes of genius. First, Derek Holder and his wife identified a niche. They saw that, while YouTube was initially considered a platform for self-expression, news, or viral content, a huge audience of young children existed under the radar, which is terrible at picking up small children because they fly so low to the ground. | |
| This is not so much a silent audience as an audience whose parents want them to be silent, which brings us to stroke number two. What tipped the channel from being a big deal to being in the top five was the decision to make longer compilation videos. Near-hour long compendiums of Wheels On Buses and Black Sheeps Baa Baaing found huge audiences and that, as all the meetings I’ve attended in Google’s offices about algorithms and best practice have repeatedly stressed, is not how it’s supposed to work. Short videos for the easily distracted, flitting viewer-bees of generation whatever it’s called this week – those are the thing. | This is not so much a silent audience as an audience whose parents want them to be silent, which brings us to stroke number two. What tipped the channel from being a big deal to being in the top five was the decision to make longer compilation videos. Near-hour long compendiums of Wheels On Buses and Black Sheeps Baa Baaing found huge audiences and that, as all the meetings I’ve attended in Google’s offices about algorithms and best practice have repeatedly stressed, is not how it’s supposed to work. Short videos for the easily distracted, flitting viewer-bees of generation whatever it’s called this week – those are the thing. |
| This is the key to the Little Bum’s success, the realisation that babies don’t choose what to watch on YouTube, their parents do. And parents don’t want to put their kids in front of YouTube for five or 10 minutes before pressing play again, they want them there for however long it takes to cook dinner, or do the school run, or stand deadly still in a dark room breathing heavily and clenching and unclenching their fists. | This is the key to the Little Bum’s success, the realisation that babies don’t choose what to watch on YouTube, their parents do. And parents don’t want to put their kids in front of YouTube for five or 10 minutes before pressing play again, they want them there for however long it takes to cook dinner, or do the school run, or stand deadly still in a dark room breathing heavily and clenching and unclenching their fists. |
| In the democratised scramble of our digital content age there is a dearth of reliable, safe places you can turn for non-awful pre-school material (further evidenced by 2015’s number one YouTube channel, the eerily calm FunToyzForever, which is just a set of hands unboxing toys, forever). In this environment, channels such as Little Baby Bum are a godsend. And the bad news for the desperate parents of very young children who’ve come to rely on it is: it won’t last. | In the democratised scramble of our digital content age there is a dearth of reliable, safe places you can turn for non-awful pre-school material (further evidenced by 2015’s number one YouTube channel, the eerily calm FunToyzForever, which is just a set of hands unboxing toys, forever). In this environment, channels such as Little Baby Bum are a godsend. And the bad news for the desperate parents of very young children who’ve come to rely on it is: it won’t last. |
| My children are now eight and 12, which means they’ve very inconveniently developed their own personalities. While the Holders made their fortune cornering the pre-independent-will market, no one has yet fixed on a strategy for convincing older children – “people”, as they might legitimately be described – not to watch things that will shape them into terrible human beings. Pre-planning doesn’t help – I’ve deliberately fostered a love of sports in my son from a minuscule age, partly so he would be good at football and wouldn’t be bullied at school (and lo, the lingering social iniquities of the father …) and partly because being outside is, you know, good for you. Better than stealing. But the line of causation from those first kickabouts leads through, yes, years of health and enjoyment, but also directly to an obsession with Fifa Ultimate Team and a handful of YouTube channels filled with furious, aggressive young men, such as Wroetoshaw and KSI. Worst of all, they’re hilarious. How can I stop him watching? | My children are now eight and 12, which means they’ve very inconveniently developed their own personalities. While the Holders made their fortune cornering the pre-independent-will market, no one has yet fixed on a strategy for convincing older children – “people”, as they might legitimately be described – not to watch things that will shape them into terrible human beings. Pre-planning doesn’t help – I’ve deliberately fostered a love of sports in my son from a minuscule age, partly so he would be good at football and wouldn’t be bullied at school (and lo, the lingering social iniquities of the father …) and partly because being outside is, you know, good for you. Better than stealing. But the line of causation from those first kickabouts leads through, yes, years of health and enjoyment, but also directly to an obsession with Fifa Ultimate Team and a handful of YouTube channels filled with furious, aggressive young men, such as Wroetoshaw and KSI. Worst of all, they’re hilarious. How can I stop him watching? |
| My daughter, though younger, isn’t much different. Transferred anxieties here focus around resisting socialised gender roles, which in other words means: desperately convincing her not to watch endless makeup tutorials and pop videos. In truth, this hasn’t been a hard battle, but the upshot is she’s now steadily working her way through the entire archive of Saturday Night Live (pro: Amy Poehler is a brilliant role model for an eight-year-old, con: she is the most sarcastic eight-year-old in the world). | My daughter, though younger, isn’t much different. Transferred anxieties here focus around resisting socialised gender roles, which in other words means: desperately convincing her not to watch endless makeup tutorials and pop videos. In truth, this hasn’t been a hard battle, but the upshot is she’s now steadily working her way through the entire archive of Saturday Night Live (pro: Amy Poehler is a brilliant role model for an eight-year-old, con: she is the most sarcastic eight-year-old in the world). |
| None of this is new, of course. Parents have been worrying about what content their children were consuming long before content was a word you could use without being laughed at in the streets. But the world around us has changed, and as we stabilise our commercial and consumptive relationship with the internet and rediscover the value of curators, trusted sources and gatekeepers, the particular struggle of parents will remain to find a safe, reliable source of things to watch, do and admire that both they and their children will like, comment and subscribe to. There’s a fortune in it for someone. | None of this is new, of course. Parents have been worrying about what content their children were consuming long before content was a word you could use without being laughed at in the streets. But the world around us has changed, and as we stabilise our commercial and consumptive relationship with the internet and rediscover the value of curators, trusted sources and gatekeepers, the particular struggle of parents will remain to find a safe, reliable source of things to watch, do and admire that both they and their children will like, comment and subscribe to. There’s a fortune in it for someone. |
| • This article was amended on 24 March 2015 to remove some personal details. |