The full trio are back in the room for the first time since the summer, and the episode opens with Emily's debrief from the Australian Children's Content Summit in Coffs Harbour — the warmth of the welcome, the flash mob at karaoke, and the more substantive observation that Australia has quietly built one of the richest kids YouTube creator ecosystems anywhere in the world. Bounce Patrol, Ms. Moni, Mikmax, Milo and Chip — the names keep coming, and Emily's point is that Screen Australia's own content hours reports aren't counting any of it.

The sharpest line from the Australia trip comes via Tina Harris of Lah-Lah Productions, whose framing of the divide between "creatives" and "creators" as a language problem rather than a values problem landed well on Emily's panel — and the consensus is that the ACCS is ahead of most conferences in actually putting both sides in the same room and letting them learn from each other.

The second half of the episode turns to the social media ban debate, which the trio are increasingly sceptical of — not because the concerns aren't real, but because banning access is being treated as a solution to what is fundamentally an algorithm problem. Jo's point that kids who get their understanding of the world from social media, and then discuss it around the dinner table, might actually be doing something more valuable than watching the 10 o'clock news is the episode's most provocative and worth sitting with. The closer is a reminder — via the WildBrain conversation — that kids are among the most commercially valuable audiences that exist, and that the industry has been too apologetic about making that case.

Hello, I'm Andy Williams and this is the Kids Media Club podcast and we're all back in the room together again.

So good day.

Emily.

So good to hear the dum da dum da dum da dum and be part of it.

And yeah, I just feel like the summer holidays are gone, thank God routine is back.

There's loads of stuff obviously we've been working on over the past while that is going to be coming out in the next few weeks.

And yeah, I made it, I made it down under and I made it back.

So yeah, so tell us, tell us.

About it, tell us about Coffs Harbour, tell us about the ACCs.

Oh yeah, nice event.

Oh, it was a lovely event, I have to say and I really appreciated the welcome I got down there from all the Aussies.

I have to say they made me feel very, very welcome and minded, you know, because you're like, I, you know, it was making new friends, if you know what I mean, down there.

And you know, there's always that moment when you're so far away and it's, you're at an event where you don't know anyone and people are just kind, you know, really kind on a personal level.

So I really appreciated that.

I got left a couple of different care packages to my room of like chocolate and orange juice and Tim Tams and all that kind of stuff.

So I really appreciate that.

I'm also not going to talk about my flash mobbing, Kate Bush flash mobbing award winning flash mob at the karaoke night.

The karaoke down there is no joke.

Guys ever going to go down.

They're all a talented bunch of singers and it is phenomenal.

But yeah, great to go down there.

There's still like, it's such an interesting market, I have to say.

You know, I've written this up in my newsletter like I think Australia has been, has always been, honestly since the days of Skippy, Australian has been scrappy about, you know, holding IP and building kids media, kids media brands and franchises and they remain doing that.

I spoke with a few traditional producers who are, you know, now evolving to be IP owners and the woes and the opportunities that come with that.

So it's just the ABC is the local commissioner which, you know, makes things challenging, but the ABC still are, you know, pushing through lots of great TV Series and collaborating, you know, systematically and, and, and non systematically with public service broadcasters throughout the world.

That, that, that coalition with the, with the ABC and BBC was announced and I was down there.

So that's on the traditional side.

On the non traditional side.

It's, it's, it's like a YouTube mecca, right?

Like there's, you know, we've had the Wiggles on the show.

Bounce Patrol is the other really big one from a preschool point of view.

But there's loads of other YouTubers down there.

I spoke with Tina from LaLa as part of the dispatch last week.

There's Ms. Moni, there's Mikmax, there's loads of other YouTubers down There.

There's Milo and Chip and Ey Stream.

So it's, it's really, I don't know, I'm really envious because Australia just seemed to be, there just seems to be this ecosystem there that is getting that type of YouTube, that type of, those type of YouTube, you know, content creators to happen.

And it was funny because we were down there was, it was something wasn't released, it was a screen.

Australia released a set of reports that was talking about, you know, the amount of hours of Australian content is down or whatever.

And I'm like, well, is anyone counting what all these guys are outputting?

Because these guys are outputting like weekly videos, right?

Yeah.

Crazy.

What, what I really liked from your dispatches was, was it Tina from LA LA who said, and she put it really succinctly but it really summed up what we've talked about a lot is that difference in vernacular.

We talk about Creative and then YouTube, you talk about creators.

But actually what we need to do is we need to pull each side together and the creative muscle that TV has needs to lean into the creator muscle that comes with the ability to multitask, respond reactively, contract turnaround, pipelines, analyze iterate.

And I just thought it was really neat what she said.

It was so such a great way to articulate it and it sounds like they made a concerted effort at the ACCs to do that.

And I wonder, did you feel like they've perhaps done it a little bit better than some of the other conferences that we've been to that were late getting YouTube there or maybe classed YouTube and creators as I'm going to say second class citizens but you know, you know what I mean?

Yeah, I mean I don't want to cast aspersions on other conferences but I will say that like, you know, there's a lot of forward facingness of the ACCs this time around.

Right.

It's my first and only time going, so I can't speak to other ways.

Sabine Zonderland from YouTube was there.

She was on my panel.

She's a former colleague of mine from Disney and is very active in advocating for the Australian creator community.

You know, I was asked actually on one of the panels like what, what, what?

Some.

It was a question to the effect of, you know, what do I.

What, you know, what was my view on people who look down on, on that type of creator economy.

And, and I said it at the panel.

I was, I just, I have no time for that.

I mean, you know, choose YouTube or choose irrelevance.

That's, that's the reality of where, yeah, the industry is, it's not perfect.

There's loads of other problems that I think we should be giving our attention to solving things like monetization, advertising, you know, algorithmic impact on, you know, of negative content on kids lives.

So yes, there's still problems but the last problem that people should be working on is how do we like make it all go back to the way it was or.

Yeah, how do we not.

How do we, how do we make it so that we don't have to do YouTube?

Right.

Like it's totally, it feels like that's the equivalent of, I mean everyone's seen Ferris Bueller's Day off, but it feels like we're, we're in dad's car trying to kind of make this, the mile spin back round and it didn't know.

Where you were going to go with that one.

No matter how much you put your foot on the accelerator and go into reverse, it's not going to go back around.

There was a lot of optimism at it, I have to say, and a lot of like, like what Tina said about, you know, this is the time, time to collaborate.

Like the creator economy is mature.

Right.

And I, I made this point on my panel as well.

Like these aren't kids in their bedrooms, right.

These are like grown up, fantastic colleagues that are running businesses, you know, actively who.

There's stuff we can learn from each other and now is the time to.

Do it because well, they're professionalizing so quickly.

Professional.

This isn't even amazing.

Absolutely.

Like you know, you speak with Shannon from Bones Patrol, etc, like they're running, you know, seven figures off YouTube.

So as she said.

So like it's, it's, it's done, you know, and, and I think then it's about what is, what can, what can we offer each other and.

Or what.

What can.

What can either side offer each other?

So, yeah, really, really positive.

Would recommend it to a friend.

It's a fabulous thing, fabulous event.

Suzanne Ryan runs it really well.

And the Aussies are just good.

The Aussies are good people and like, it's just nice.

It's when you go that far away.

As I said, just to bring it back to the point I started on, I did really appreciate the welcome I got down there.

So thanks to all of our Aussie listeners and the folks that support us.

So that's great.

I had one question though, before we finished off on the Australian summit, which was you Talked about the YouTube ecosystem.

How.

What was your impression of.

Because they've had the social media ban before us in the uk, what was your impression in terms of how disruptive that had been for that ecosystem?

Yeah, for any serious YouTuber, what I was hearing is it wasn't having a major impact and that, that makes sense.

Right, because YouTube is a global platform.

Your audience on a YouTube channel is a global audience.

It's not like a linear broadcaster, you know, where that, that local audience is taken away and that's, that's super impactful.

Australia as a percentage of the overall English language population is quite small.

Right.

Like it's, it's smaller than us, it's significantly smaller than uk, it's bigger than Ireland, that's fine.

But like it's, it's still not huge.

And you know, in terms of the revenue and stuff like that, a lot of the revenue for this for Kids creators is coming out of US CBMs and stuff.

So.

Yeah, right.

No major impact.

No.

Anyone I spoke to, not, not a, not a super discernible impact in, in, in engagement or in, in revenue.

So I don't know.

Yeah, it doesn't matter.

And I think a combination of that, it being a relatively small percentage of global revenues, but also.

And depending on who you read, you can get differing opinions, but all of them seem to agree that it's actually not worked as well as they thought it might have done in terms of keeping kids off social media.

Of course we know that there's ways to circumvent it and if you are determined to be online, you will either pester your parents to set you up an account as an adult or you'll find a way to get access to a VPN or whatever.

But it doesn't seem to have been a resounding success to the point where I was reading about it last week and then also stumbled upon a Piece from Dame Rachel d', Souza, who is the Children's Commissioner in the uk, who was also rather frustrated at the lack of impact the Online Safety act seemed to have been having on social media or online harms in the uk.

And again, she was a little frustrated that the regulatory bodies weren't bearing their teeth enough.

And it seems like.

I don't know, Jo, I read that article.

She sent it a bit more than a little.

Well, I know, I mean.

But good for her.

Yeah, No, I know.

Yeah.

I mean, she was peed off.

Yeah.

But you know what?

Good for you.

I was just gonna debritish you there for a second.

Yeah, she was not a little frustrated.

She was pretty frustrated, yes.

So it does call into question, really.

We're at a crunch time.

We're at a crunch time in the sense that we need to step up what we're doing to keep kids safe online, but also we need to be mindful of the fact that potentially, if tough decisions are taken.

And it's something that you mentioned, Andy, before, when we were chatting, if you take tough decisions, you do potentially impact a whole industry and the options that they've still got left in reaching that audience.

Yeah.

The issue I have with all.

The thing that frustrates me with it all is it's all around access and none of it is around algorithm.

That's.

That seems to be the.

The big.

The big miss in all of this.

Right.

It's like, oh, kids can't access it or.

Oh, yeah, because this goes with the metafine.

The.

The metafines that came through in the last few weeks as well.

It's like, oh, we'll turn it off.

At, like, yeah, two hour.

Two hours.

School and da, da, da.

And that's all operational impact and not looking at the algorithms of these platforms, which is basically.

That's the issue.

Right.

Like, as far as I can see it, that's.

That.

That would be my view.

You know, there's still.

Yeah, it still seems to be that certainly the purge of AI slop and AI accounts hasn't been so great at removing AI slop from being recommended to young kids.

I did read a couple of articles last week that were saying it was still showing up and being served despite the removal of a good few million AI channels.

So again, it's.

It's imperfect.

I would rejoice in my child's, you know, absorbing AI stuff, but as long as it's not harmful, you know.

Right.

Like it's the harmful stuff and that, it's that user journey that needs to be addressed.

You know, the user journey for teen, you know, teen girls down to, you know, like unnatural standards of beauty and too much focus just on their own, you know, their own bodies, their own faces and stuff like that.

It's that stuff that's harmful and sorry not to rejoice in AI slap.

That definitely needs to be dealt with too.

It needs to be dealt from a copyright point of view as well in a major way.

But it's the harmful stuff that is the trigger for me and that can only be addressed from an algorithm point of view.

If kids are limited to two hours a day on, on these platforms and that's two hours of change your face, change your face, change your face, get skinnier, get skinnier, get skinnier.

This is harmful.

That's worse.

That's the problem, you know.

Yeah.

One of the things that Roblox has been doing and Roblox comes with a whole heap of caveats in terms of, you know, the, the troubles that it's had and the harms that have been encountered there.

Also worth pointing out that they're making a lot of changes.

But one of those is to algorithm, algorithmic recommendation I suppose in that they've tweaked it recently away from those kind of hyper casual, very shallow game loops to prioritizing games that have got great retention, that people go back to that.

So and that is a step in the right direction.

It doesn't fix the whole issue, but they have been quite forward thinking as they have in a lot of other things in nycha going okay, well we just need to tweak the algorithm then we need to start rewarding things that does that.

Games and experiences that do make players come back, that serve them, that evolve, that change that.

So that retention thing, which feels like it could work as well, I think the algorithm, I also, yeah, I also.

Think people's kind of expectations of.

I think there's always going to be content on a user generated platform.

There's always going to be some content that might not be appropriate but then can be pulled down quickly, I think.

And I think it's how to kind of make the numbers kind of work in our favor more so that that stuff is picked up and, and flagged as quickly as possible.

But I think some people have kind of, I think an expectation that they'll never, there'll be a point where there'll never be any of that stuff and I just think there's always going to be the risk of.

Yeah.

That content.

Human beings are weirdos and we're drawn to weird stuff.

Yeah, we're drawn to stuff that's not good for us sometimes.

Right.

Yeah, you know, Absolutely.

Yeah.

I saw the kind of.

Within the uk, the social media band was still very much on the table after Annie Burnham's come back.

And the thing that on my feed particularly, seems to particularly irk the people that pop up on my feeder, people that are 17 or 18 and being told that there'll be like a social media curfew and that there'll be.

I think it was 8 o'.

Clock.

That from 8 o' clock onwards that they won't be allowed on social media.

I don't know how on earth you're gonna enforce that, but I think.

I don't know whether that's over egging the social media ban to kind of.

I think 16 and above.

I don't know.

You're asking people to pay taxes and.

Yeah.

Potentially vote, and it feels like they're adult enough to.

To make their own decisions to some extent.

Yeah.

And back to the point about that Rachel d' Souza was making, if you're going to do that and it's going to work, then you have to be willing to step up and slap some hefty fines on the big tech platforms.

Yeah.

Are they really going to take the fights them?

Well, what worries me about that, I'm going to play devil's advocate a bit on that, is the children's media isn't seen as being a particularly profitable area for a lot of those social media companies.

I mean, and this might be for a children's commission, this might be exactly what they'd prefer to happen, but they might decide that actually it's.

It's not worth the hassle and so they'll do absolute minimum that they can and to protect themselves from liability.

Well, that's a depressing piece, isn't it?

Because it's like the Copa.

And yet YouTube's ad revenue has not barely faltered in, you know, going up multiples in that time, you know.

Yeah, all right.

Yeah.

But it's.

Yeah, it's tricky.

The other thing I think is.

Doesn't really ever get discussed.

But is there.

Is there any kind of benefit to social media in terms of teaching teenagers media literacy in a way that if they weren't allowed on those platforms at all, they'd lose something.

I go, Joe, go on.

Well, look at how it's used and in a way it is social media in a peer to peer way, but that's got less and less over time.

It's less about connecting with your friends and understanding what your friends are into or shared experiences or.

I mean, we have, we've had the news movement on.

Teenagers are getting their understanding of the world, rightly or wrongly, from social media.

And actually there are some really positive creators and out there that are doing some really good, interesting stuff.

I've had my kids don't watch the 10 o' clock news on the BBC or Channel 4.

Yeah.

But I've had some really interesting conversations with them about conflicts and chip prices and minerals and, you know, why Trump wants Greenland.

But they get that from social media and they will then take it and then we'll have a discussion about it.

I think when you're to your point, Andy, when you're asking young people, well, when they go into a world of work that is inherently digital, they need to go into that world of work set up to be able to be productive and successful in that world.

If you don't let them access it until they enter the world of work, they've got to play catch up.

But similarly, if you're going to ask them to vote at 16 but they're not allowed to access social media at 18, I can't rationalize that.

I don't understand it.

Yeah, and there is like a, there's a bogeymanism about social media, right?

Like, you know, social media is causing every, you know, is the lead cause of anxiety amongst young people.

But like, you know, what about cost of living crisis and two parents struggling to make ends meet and two parents constantly being out of the house, having to work.

Right.

Like, you know, there's, that's a much harder problem to solve than turning on the boogeyman of social media.

Absolutely.

We did, I did this.

It was involved in a study this year speaking with parents and kids 8 to 14 about their media habits.

Parents see the value of YouTube and TikTok, right?

Kids are learning loads of stuff on there.

They're pursuing their curiosities.

That's where culture happens too, you know, and you might not think that 6, 7 is that valuable or Italian brain rot is that valuable.

But that's like, that's you culture, right?

Like that, that's, that's them.

That's how they're connecting that people like, have I spoke, I love Shabbat says, have you seen have you seen Shabbat?

Says, see, he's now got a, like a, like a documentary on the BBC called Shabbat Asks, like, you know, and.

He's also on EastEnders.

Is he?

My gosh, it's like living the dream.

He doesn't need my shadow anymore.

He's, he's, he's, he's a big, he's a big wig.

But, but like, that's where culture happens, right?

And that's, that's really important.

And you know, again, talking about, like, public service media and like, the relevance of public service media, like, and is it culturally relevant content and all that kind of stuff.

The kids are already making their own culturally relevant content.

You know, that's what's happening on these digital platforms, just not taking the form it used to.

So there are loads of benefits of it.

And yeah, there's pitfalls too.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I don't know what the answer is.

I have to say the answer needs to be more looking around the algorithm than looking around the operational side of it, in my opinion.

100%.

Yeah, 100% agree.

And just to bring up something that we've spoken about before with regards to both Wild Brain and Greg Draiman, we've had him on is the value of kids.

And that seems a little bit paradoxical, thinking in terms of monetizing their eyeballs and their attention.

But we've spoken about how when fandom or when their decisions are still quite elastic, when you're figuring out who you are and what you like and what you're into, actually that's an optimum time to engage kids with.

You know, if you're a bank, the bank account that you sign up for, because they have the best perks when you're 10, tends to be the one you're still with at 30.

And so actually they're a very valuable audience with the right guardrails and safeguards, but actually they're super valuable.

Who wouldn't want a kid and their family building an affinity with, I don't know, well, a financial institution at that age?

And it's worth investing in the relationship with them.

And it's something that certainly Emma Witowski from Wildbrain that we spoke to, she reposted an article I'd written about it.

In terms of.

We talk about how COP is there to safeguard and how it's kneecapped monetization.

What we don't talk about is just how valuable that kids audience is and that with the right safeguards in place, there should be even much more investment flowing into advertising around that content.

Yeah, 100%.

So we need to figure out how we then funnel that back into making the content and then sorting out the algorithm.

Job done.

That's just Monday.

Yeah, great.

So normal service resumes.

We're back.

We're back.

Schools are back.

Routine is back in place.

We're on the run into end of year BLE coming up.

Mipcom coming up.

A few announcements from the kids media club coming up.

Exciting few months.

Yeah, it's gonna be busy.

Okay, Andy, over to you.

I'm teeing you up here.

Okay.

So I hope you guys enjoyed listening to that.

The gang's all back together.

Please like and watch and listen wherever.

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