They are supremely addicted to that stuff (even the non-objectionable ones), it was scary to witness.
Then there was the instance, a sort of another soft "Adpocalypse" where all these videos featuring children had creepy comments. This caused a culling of comments on certain videos, but it was ultimately a situation YouTube had fostered.
It's just a never ending deluge of spam and bullshit in my brain and it's been there for so long and has increased to such a ludicrous degree as I actually now LAUGH when I see an ad shoved into a new place.
Like, I do not understand why anybody is spending money on advertising. You could be advertising the most amazing product in the history of the world and you would be simply drowned in spam, and no one would ever see it or care.
And to bring this rant back to topic, of course kids are the only ones left. They haven't had their minds assaulted with predatory conniving language for decades yet. They're the only ones who still look at ads as anything other than spam email but in whatever format it's in. But don't worry; at the breakneck pace advertisers are set into now, they'll be getting used to it even sooner, and it will be even LESS effective, until the only people still watching ads are infants crapping their pants. Maybe we can monetize little holograms in diapers and then sell the diapers for 5 cents cheaper. Let's just get to the bottom of this barrel!
Not only are you very likely affected on a subconscious level by the nonstop avalanche of ads that surround us all, but worse, you have a false sense of security that you're immune to them.
Advertisers (especially Direct Response) are some of the more analytical folks you'll meet. They won't spend a cent on a channel if they are not making it back in downstream conversions.
B2B advertising and directed, targeted campaigns probably have good results. The spam shit I’m talking about? The crap you see on YouTube especially? I doubt it.
This fact means nothing for as long as one can accumulate ad dollars based on views generated by children.
As another comment already correctly stated: kids do have indirect spending power by being able to manipulate the spending of their parents. This works particularly well with the kind of parent that uses YouTube as an easy and reliable pacifier - this kind of parent will most likely also take the easy way out of the situation of an obnoxious kid screaming and blaring about it's dire need for product X (as seen on YouTube), which means buying the product so the goddamn kid shuts up.
Secondly, even brand advertisers have specific demographics in mind. So while a kid video will appeal to a kid specific brand (think cereals or toys), many brands won't spend in that category.
Given this, your thesis here is not entirely accurate.
To me the worst are the stupid "Live" videos, which aren't really live and just parks the children for hours on a stupid loop with a worrisome Chat window that pops open.
For a while I only let her watch YT Kids, which I configured to only allow the shows that I personally approve. The Amazon Fire tablet for kids is OK too.
The problem is that you likely don't want to log in the kid's device to your own Google account (with premium activated). If you want to create another account just for that, you need to lie about the age, and need to link a credit card to pay for the account — and for anything else on YouTube, then.
It would be great to have kid-specific accounts with parental control and access limitations; MS provides something similar.
(I'm 100% serious, and at this point I wonder if there's business in selling a NAS preconfigured for streaming as a set-top box, with parents responsible for dropping URLs that youtube-dl will then download.)
Is it common for young kids to own the devices where they look the videos at?
1) young children are more likely to incorrectly click an ad or to not skip the ad (because they can't really read or understand that the ads are skippable)
2) young children often do not have ad blocking software installed
3) young children are more likely to watch playlists
The overall effect is that young children demographic is the most profitable demographic on youtube. Also lots of parents are basically using youtube as a form of free babysitting. Next time you go to the grocery store, just look at how many kids are sitting in the cart tapping away on a phone or a tablet.