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MIPTV 2017 Preview: Kate Walker, Marketing Director, WildBrain

By Kate Walker, Marketing Director

March 30, 2017 | 4 min read

The below is written by Kate Walker, Marketing Director, WildBrain, and is part of Found Remote's MIPTV 2017 preview series. Found Remote will again be at MIPTV with Applicaster (come say hi at the booth: Palais R7.J15).

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Kids’ content on YouTube: The New Essentials in 2017

Kids’ and family content continues to dominate the top channels on YouTube and now accounts for billions of views each day. The YouTube Kids app is now available in 26 countries and the online platform topped the favourite kids’ brands list in 2016. Whilst it’s undeniable that kids IP owners need to be present on the platform, the first step is to be clear about your primary goal: Is it brand awareness or revenue creation? When making decisions around monetization and revenue creation, particularly for new content, we follow a simple model at WildBrain:

Audience - Is there an audience?

This is a great point to start. Does your idea have a pre-existing audience, and how saturated is this audience with other content that will be similar? How likely is the audience to watch, re-watch and share, and how well does it monetize?

Brand - Is your brand or product good enough?

Contrary to popular thinking, YouTube is full of high quality content. You can find yourself competing with Teletubbies or a video made in someone’s basement. It’s naïve to think that it’s simple to replicate. YouTube producers are well connected to their fans, they constantly iterate, produce content daily and weekly, and they put a lot of thought into it. If you’re making content for YouTube, you have to make sure that you are matching and beating the competition.

Commitment - Will you fund and support a one-year strategy?

Arguably the most important. Just dumping your content on the platform and hoping that the dollars start rolling in won’t work. The platform rewards frequency, improving engagement, growth and consistency. Having a plan that reaches out over the next 12 months, even though in the first few months you’ll generate little revenue, requires commitment.

If you don’t own multiple, long-form seasons, do you own the IP, and can you make alternative content featuring the characters? Toy-play videos, 2D-animated songs, gameplay videos and presenter-led shows are not expensive to make, and low-fi style content can work well on YouTube.

HARNESS THE YOUTUBE ALGORITHM

The algorithm changes pretty frequently. It’s in YouTube’s interest to drive more views and more revenue and with that in mind, changes to the algorithm are usually aimed at making long-term improvements.

Understand your channels and react quickly to your audience and the platform. We’ve built specific tools that enable us to identify changes and react quickly.

Be flexible, test and reiterate.

Learn from the competition. Watch and learn how native creators operate.

HOW TO BREAK NEW CONTENT ONLINE

It’s not easy. It takes a combination of effort and expertise. Sunny Bunnies is a brand that we have worked on for over a year, and a great example. By exploiting the popularity of searches for full length kids’ cartoons, uploading regularly and better optimising the content for the platform, we’ve taken the channel to 125,000 subscribers and lifetime views of 74 million. The producers are really pleased and the brand is gaining traction for the next series, as well as providing useful data on audiences for the show.

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