My daughter, who's primary video consumption is on Youtube, has started to get to the age that she's concerned about fashion, decoration, etc. I realized that she's getting a lot of this from Youtube, not via direct advertisements, but via "influencers" who have been "encouraged" to place a product, either via money or free products. In some ways this is far more insidious. At least with ads you can learn to tune them out, it's a whole new skill to identify where you are seeing paid product placement.

^ this is just as bad. At least a lot of the youtube videos I watch are often sponsored by e.g. squarespace which is neutral enough. But those are unblockable ads, basically.

...just like a lot of cartoons were back when we were growing up, Transformers and He-Man and even Star Wars were all advertisements for toys (although in Star Wars' case the toys came after the movie. Still made them several times what the movies made them though).

No such thing as free content.

I don't know how old your daughter is, but young children haven't fully developed their cognitive skill to fully "understand" advertisements

http://www.apa.org/pubs/info/reports/advertising-children.as...

>Basic developmental research on egocentrism and perspective taking, along with a great deal of evidence specifically examining developmental differences in the comprehension of persuasive intent within advertisements, establishes clearly that most children younger than 7–8 years of age do not recognize the persuasive intent of commercial appeals. However, there is far less research examining whether and at what ages children begin to appreciate that advertising messages are inherently biased or on when children begin to develop strategies to counteract the bias within these messages. It is clear that both of these abilities are dependent upon the child’s development of the ability to understand the persuasive intent of advertising, meaning that mature comprehension of advertising occurs no earlier than age 7–8 years on average.

But there used to be such a thing as free content.

Like the Flash animations I used to watch on albinoblacksheep and newgrounds in middle school, and early YouTube.

It's still around, and not necessarily less of it. But it easily get drowned out by the sheer volume of other content.

My son has managed to become obsessed with fashion brands from audio podcasts. It’s amazing how this stuff gets into the house.

Alas, that isn't the case. Your kids see 1/20th of the explicitly obvious ads, and probably 20x the product placements, Instagram "brand ambassadors", and other subtle tricks that advertisers devised to get past our ability to mental filter out clearly-marked ads.

Absolutely. But with a lot of Youtube content aimed at kids, Youtubers are definitely promoting products indirectly.