Video Interview: Exploring the Middle Kingdom

Understanding the 6-to-9 set is paramount for tracking where kids’ media consumption is headed, as is cracking the discoverability conundrum, Dubit’s David W. Kleeman and independent media consultant Emily Horgan outlined at this year’s TV Kids Summer Festival.

“It’s the age when they’re starting to split off into peer groups, develop their own interests and when the parents cede control of the remote or the mobile device,” said Kleeman, senior VP of global trends at Dubit. “It’s where the audience fragments for the first time. Preschool is much easier to concentrate on and figure out what will work for a broad audience. You get to 6 to 9 and you’ve got your gamers, your TV kids, your YouTube kids, and they have different hobbies. It can be really hard to gain traction at that age. We talk about 6 to 9, and then a little bit of 9 to 12, as the ‘middle kingdom.’ A lot of times, if they are an older sibling, they’ve got control of the remote for the first time. If they’re a younger sibling, they have to struggle to watch what they want to watch. You’ll see that things not really for the 6-to-9 age group often come up as things that they like best.”

Discoverability, especially in streaming, is an issue. “Discovery in streaming is having a major crisis,” said Horgan, who covers developments in kids’ media via her newsletter, The Kids StreamerSphere, and podcast, Kids Media Club. “Back on linear, we knew how to program; we knew how to do a nice lead-in, lead-out. We knew our time slots, we knew who our audience was, and we could program to that. In streaming, there are a lot of question marks. These streaming interfaces are built up from the EPGs of the past, and there’s nothing less engaging than an EPG. The discovery mechanism that streaming is based on doesn’t really service the audience. With platforms like YouTube and, to a certain extent, Roblox, the discovery algorithms are much more tactile. They can communicate much more seamlessly with a potential viewer of that content. I also think there’s an opportunity for that quality engagement. If you can have 100 people playing the game versus 1,000 people knowing it exists, the quality of what you’re getting is so different. That’s where platforms like Roblox and YouTube have such an opportunity in this discovery question.”