Trend-Watching with Dubit

The conference portion of the TV Kids Summer Festival wrapped today with Dubit CEO Ian Douthwaite and team members Laura Dudley-Gough and Benjamin Sumner revealing new research on kids’ media habits and tips for how IP owners can explore opportunities in gaming.

The session, featuring new intelligence from the youth research and digital development studio on how kids are engaging with content and gaming, can be viewed here.

Sumner, head of trends, showcased some of the findings from Dubit’s global youth trends tracker. “Kids spend over 22 percent of their week on digital activities, which is second only to the amount of time they spend sleeping per week.” That includes 12 hours on video content, 10 hours on gaming and the rest on social media messaging and internet browsing.

“There are shifts by age, so younger children spend more time sleeping and engaging with physical toys, obviously more parent-led at that age than having their own needs and wants for their entertainment lives. Digital time starts with watching video. Younger kids are able to passively engage with digital content through watching video at a younger age, but are obviously quite young to be actively engaging with their own devices themselves. When they start to get a little bit older, that’s when the gaming starts to come in much more heavily. By ages 12 to 15, we see that sleep drops down from eight hours per night to seven hours per night, and that’s replaced with digital activities and not just solo gaming, but also talking to others more through messaging and social media.”

In the U.K. and the U.S., YouTube is the dominant platform; 70 percent of kids ages 1 to 18 use YouTube or YouTube Kids at least once per week. That rises to 78 percent for those 12 to 18. TikTok is being used by 64 percent of those in the 12-to-18 set weekly, with Netflix at about the same level.

The session then shifted to the gaming space, with awareness and frequency of play high for Minecraft, Roblox and Fortnite. More than 50 percent of kids under 13 are playing on Roblox weekly.

“We found that for children of all ages, gaming can have a positive impact on their mental wellbeing,” Dudley-Gough said. “This can range from things like being able to connect with friends socially, have fun with them, it allows them to escape and relax, be creative, learn things and achieve things.”

Sumner also highlighted the increasing usage of subscription services for games, as well as more co-gaming among parents and kids.

Douthwaite then shifted the spotlight to Roblox in particular, which has about 100 million daily users and 350 million monthly. “Some stats, not ours, show that people who play Roblox in the U.S. spend 180 minutes online per day, compared with just 107 minutes on TikTok and 67 minutes on YouTube. Roblox is becoming a big competitor to YouTube in some respects. There are 140 games on there with over 1 billion plays. That’s made our work in the digital side change quite significantly, in that a lot of brands want to be where the young people are. Those brands have followed the numbers. In some cases, we can guarantee people can reach millions of players in a few days.”

Dubit’s research has found that young audiences are not uncomfortable with brands in Roblox, Sumner said, especially around sports and clothing.

“Does this mean it’s an opportunity for people in animation? We think so, yes,” Douthwaite said. “The cost of producing a game in Roblox is so much less than animation, so much less than film. There are plenty of ways to be on that platform, from having a full-on game around your IP—that’s probably the most expensive one—to pop-up games, which you can integrate into an already popular game. Or you can create fashion items, which is a cheap way of getting onto that platform. With gaming, you are potentially hitting a new audience as well, so you can create awareness of the brand or IP easily.”

As for the revenue opportunities within Roblox, Douthwaite highlighted game subscriptions as well as virtual and real merchandise.

Douthwaite expects Roblox to continue to grow in usage as new audiences join, with the platform having a target of 1 billion concurrent users by 2029. He’s also keeping his eye on Meta Horizon World. “They can tap into huge audiences they’ve already amassed through Facebook, Instagram, Threads and so on.”