There are “basically zero dollars in creating made-for-kids content on YouTube”, Chris Williams, CEO of kids’ studio pocket.watch, said on Saturday at MIPJunior 2026 in Cannes. The platform itself, where more and more children’s producers start out as commissions decline, admits that the status quo is not okay. “In no way do we think the status quo is okay… We want to crack this model,” YouTube executive Amy Singer replied from the same stage.
The same day, 10 October 2026, in the market’s headline keynote, Gregory Dray, co-founder of studio Animaj, who was previously part of the YouTube Kids leadership, put numbers on that model. According to him, kids and family content accounts for more than 15% of YouTube viewing but generates less than 2% of its advertising revenue. “We cannot continue like this, otherwise, in just a few years, we’ll all be out of business,” he said. YouTube’s dominance also creates “some sort of responsibility” and the platform “needs to care about the state of the industry”, he added.
Who pays for kids’ shows today
In children’s television, public broadcasters such as the BBC are the biggest source of commissions for new shows. Streaming services are commissioning significantly fewer kids’ shows than at their peak, as Ampere Analysis analyst Cyrine Amor showed in her charts. Ampere’s data show streamers ordered 196 of them in the twelve months to mid-2022 and 88 in the same period four years later, although that was up on the previous year. According to Amor, the drop in commissions means producers increasingly launch content digitally first and carry more of the risk.
Czech studio Krutart is carrying risk too, with its animated series Alma a Kory. “In the Czech Republic, most television projects are made to order for a broadcaster,” studio head Martin Jůza said in April 2026. “We took the route of producing an independent work over which we want to have full control.” The series had not yet been made. Even so, according to Jůza, it had European pre-sales to streaming services in France and Italy and to public broadcasters in Estonia, Switzerland and Slovenia. But he says these will cover only a single-digit percentage of its CZK 60.9 million budget. The Czech State Audiovisual Fund backed the series with a grant of CZK 15.4 million.
In the fund’s 2026 call, which it opened as a new format for the complete development or production of an animated series, projects requested more than CZK 73 million. The fund’s board had CZK 34 million available for animation. Twelve of the submitted projects target a child audience. The board saw the applicants’ partnerships with public broadcaster Czech Television and Czech video-on-demand (VOD) platforms as “mostly weak, loosely connected and insufficiently confirmed”. According to the assessment, projects in the series call may in future also target TV distribution, VOD platforms or YouTube.
How studios are trying to make money on YouTube
Since February 2026, YouTube advertising for Peppa Pig and other Hasbro and Animaj brands has been sold exclusively by LUMEE, the two companies’ joint venture. Dray is its chairman. In June this year, in an interview with the Streaming Made Easy newsletter, he said LUMEE sells only placements booked in advance and runs no auction.
“The old model used to be commissioning a show and then hoping for it to succeed,” said Charmaine Fernandes, Hasbro’s director of global digital distribution. For her company, YouTube has made it possible to “test content quickly, learn from that content, make changes required”. Nicolas Fisch of Mediawan Kids & Family, producer for digital-first and AI projects, is also using YouTube to grow a mobile game into a wider franchise. “YouTube is a place where we can start with shorts, where we can test gags, stories, characters, where we can scale into longer-form content,” he said.
The cat characters of the Warrior Cats book series, which fans brought to life on YouTube themselves, are getting their first TV series, from Disney. Coolabi is behind both the book series and the series deal. One fan built a popular game on Roblox. The company embraced it and let it run. According to Coolabi’s Jo Redfern, “without UGC there wouldn’t be a Disney+ show in 2028”.
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