This seems especially true for YouTube kids to me. Do kids really care whether the content was produced a year or a week ago? It's not a news outlet. We literally have enough content available for each kid's whole childhood. YouTube could decide to review and allow one new channel per month per language and the consumers wouldn't be affected.

> Do kids really care whether the content was produced a year or a week ago?

I'd be surprised if there weren't a bunch of kids who really wanted to see content from the latest Minecraft update.

A full time staff of 20 would be enough to scan enough content to outpace what any child could ever watch during their entire adolescence.

Yes, they care.

I guess I should've been clearer about the age/context here. There's a period when they'll watch some show on repeat a hundred times. Or a generic cartoon - it doesn't matter when it was produced.

Sure, it will start shifting once they want to watch something their peers watch. But at the time parents choose the media, how would they even know it's not the latest production, or some mix of old/new?

Peppa pig started in 2004. At the time kids are interested in it, if you show them ep 2, will they say "this is not from series 6 from 2019"?

They care when growing out of "kids" program and they care for specific series.

Even with a more restrictive approach Google/YouTube could whitelist specific content providers, which could provide fresh content on a frequent schedule.

I never understood this either. Why not go to a whitelisting model for channel owners and just start with large brands like PBS that have a vested interest in their reputation. You get the benefit of new videos from those channels and then slowly work through a backlog.

Now that ads are blocked, what is the revenue model for YTKids videos?

I was about to suggest that content creators pay a nominal fee for the content to be reviewed but if creators have no way to monetize the platform, that proposal is bijective with suggesting that Google just shut down YTKids. Or are parents paying already for access to YTKids and the reviews would come out of that?

The YT Kids app itself was never monetized to begin with. They only monetized viewing of kids videos on regular YouTube.

There was a post here a few months ago showing curated youtube content for kids. I'm sure a few of these exist.

The outrage machine would find something new to be upset about. Every week there'd be another channel coming out of the woodwork upset that they could not make the YouTube Kids cut.

Curation is messy, but that doesn't mean we should throw up our hands or, worse, think an algorithm can do it.

The argument here is whether imperfect curation is better than none, and the history of television tells us that it is. We never had a TV channel that randomly showed kids pro-suicide messages.