My kids don't have a YouTube channel — but they pretend they do

When I was a kid, I’d pretend to be a soldier or a baseball player. Today, kids apparently aspire to be vloggers. It’s not enough for them to watch their favorite shows. They want to broadcast their lives, banter with commenters and keep their make-believe view counts high. It’s a shift from the era of Mickey Mouse or Hannah Montana – and one that bodes well for YouTube as it tries to capture a generation of children who couldn’t tell you what a cable box was for.

In 2015, YouTube launched its first kids app, YouTube Kids. The app, which had more than 10 billion views the first year alone, comes with stricter advertising guidelines, parental controls and voice search that has an uncanny ability to understand kids (It took me weeks to realize what my kids were saying when they kept asking to watch a channel with 2.7 million subscribers called CookieSwirlC. I kept calling it Kooky World Sea). Children ages 11 and younger are one of the fastest growing audiences for digital video, growing nearly four times as fast as viewers ages 18 to 24, according to eMarketer.