Why Toy Videos get Hundreds of Millions of Views on Youtube Explained
On Youtube there are these weird videos of people playing with toys, showing them off and speaking, that get hundreds of millions of views.
Similar videos exists such as repetitive nursery rhymes, car wash videos with super heroes, and live action skits with Elsa and Spiderman, and more strange animations.
I started to stumble across these videos in early 2016 when I looked up which youtube channels we’re getting the most views on the website in order to determine if the original content produced by the sites users represented a significant amount of the views, or if they were just a back seat to the channels with television clips and music videos.
What I found instead was many of the top rising channels had nothing but these weird toy videos on them.
I decided to investigate what was going on and started to collect data on the videos and channels. I made this video to present my conclusions:
While a video uploader can disable this feature, on most videos you can check statistics under the video under the “more” tab and you will get a graph which shows how many views a video had on a certain date. Some videos also include a total time watched tab.
If you look at a normal video, you find that the total time watched divided by the number of views is usually half the length of the video.
People usually leave in the first few seconds, but if a viewer makes it through the beginning there is a good chance they will stick it out until almost the end.
However when you look at these toy videos there is a remarkably different pattern.
Kids were watching these videos for about 2 minutes regardless of how long the videos actually were. (This pattern holds for the videos with hundreds of millions of views, on newer videos with “just” millions, the range of times is much wider, but its still a lot shorter than you would expect based on length)
This was surprising for a few reasons. I would have expected that these videos were getting these really high numbers from kids leaving youtube on autoplay, but if that was the case then the average view time would be related to the length of the video.
So while autoplay is a factor, the vast majority of the views seem to be coming from kids who actively decide to leave the videos at some point, probably around the 2 minute mark.
The watch times probably follow a normal distribution with a mean of around 2 minutes, so some kids probably still watch most of the video, or leave after 5 seconds, but youtube still counts views even if its only for 2 minutes.
The kids are still using youtube for a considerable amount of time so in half an hour the average kid will watch about 15 videos, but for normal viewers they may watch 4 or 5.
This means views for this class of videos are going to be higher in general. The market of kids is probably of a similar size as the general market, but it has the added bonus of being English optional. A child in Italy can watch a video made by someone in Poland and doesn’t care since the words are not what they are after.
Social systems like youtube generally follow a power law, and so most of the attention in the form of views goes to the top videos, this allows the videos to snowball, which makes the considerable advantage the toy videos have in obtaining views appear to be even larger when we only look at the top videos.
Another thing to consider is that the videos with hundreds of millions of views tend to be compilations, some over an hour long. Even these videos get average watch time of 2 minutes, but YouTube tends to recommended a video you have begun watching to you again if you haven’t finished it, so the same person will watch these videos multiple times.
Many people have speculated that these channels are using bots or buying views. While I don’t have any evidence of any channels doing this, I suspect they do, but this does not explain the extremely high numbers these videos get.
The purpose of buying views is ultimately to get even more views by artificially increasing your videos ranking in search results and recommendations. If it wasn’t possible for these videos to get millions of views naturally, there would be no incentive to buy views in the first place.
If a channel is buying views, they may buy a million or so when they post the video, and this would make the video appear high in search results and as suggested videos, since it seems like people want to watch the video. The video would then get millions of legitimate views, so much in fact that if YouTube then removed all the bought views, it would hardly be noticeable.
The actually content of these videos is often quite strange.
Particularly the sub class of these videos where you have live action actors playing as super heroes and princesses can push the boundary of what is acceptable for kids.
These types of videos generally have an Elsa and a Spiderman, this is to capitalize on the fact that Elsa is popular with little girls and Spiderman is popular with little boys. Often it will also include various other characters as well such as Venom and the Joker.
All of these videos are often pretty much the same thing repeated over and over again, with many recurring themes, such as pregnancy, which is not limited to Elsa…
The videos have to be the same thing, because similar videos are recommended next to each other, so all the other channels repeat what is most popular.
The other thing that should be noted is the subject matter, while extremely weird, is not random. The channels are often using syringes and pregnancy, not because they want to damage kids, but because that is what the the kids are clicking. These channels are successful because they use kidbait, which includes having colorful thumbnails, popular characters, and syringes…apparently.
This entire bizarre word can be explained by the simple fact that these people are after money. YouTube sharing revenue with its creators was an incredibly bold move, and it resulted in many wonderful things being made, but it also lead to things like this no one would have guessed would be profitable.
I have talked to some people who are trying to get into making these kid videos, and usually they are just normal people looking for a side income. Their videos were very low on the weird scale though.
This is pure speculation, but I think that these types of videos would receive far less money from ads per view than normal youtube videos, since kids can’t actually buy things. The high number of views might counter this, but there are alternative ways these videos can make money.
The first is from youtube red. When marketing the Youtube Kids app, youtube often would try to get people to subscribe to youtube red along with it. Youtube red pays according to how long someone watches a video, so obviously the 2 minute watch time means each view is less valuable, but its still a considerable amount of money.
The other way is that the videos themselves are often ads. Talking to parents I know that after their kids watch these videos they will want to get those toys. The larger channels probably have deals with toy manufacturers to feature their toys. Like most things the top earners probably make millions of dollars, but their situation should not be considered the norm.
When I first discovered these channels they we’re rising rapidly, but to the general community they were just an oddity. Since then they have became a bit of a joke in the Youtube community. These channels are still rapidly growing even after months, and there will probably come a time where the most viewed channels are primarily toy channels.
