Ms. Rachel shot roughly three hours of video for toddlers, and with it racked up 208 million viewing hours on Netflix in the first half of 2026. A former nursery school teacher who started her channel because of her own son's delayed speech development now holds one of the most-watched spots in Netflix's kids' library, with a catalogue that a traditional studio would consider laughably small. And she is not an exception. According to the latest data, the growth in Netflix's kids' viewing is being driven by creators who grew up on YouTube.
The figures come from the sixth edition of the Netflix Kids Content Performance Report, compiled twice a year by Emily Horgan, an independent kids' media consultant and former Disney executive. The report is not affiliated with Netflix and builds on the engagement data the streaming service itself publishes twice a year. Horgan goes through more than 50,000 data points across thousands of titles and translates them into rankings by genre, format and studio. On LinkedIn, the analyst behind the Entertainment Strategy Guy handle recommends it as required reading for anyone working in kids' media.
Nothing has moved at the top, the growth is elsewhere
The very top of the ranking is held by established brands. According to the report, seven kids' series passed the 200 million viewing hours mark, and for the first time since the report launched, the top three stayed unchanged. PAW Patrol leads, followed by Gabby’s Dollhouse and Peppa Pig. “What stands out in H1 is the breadth of what can work on Netflix Kids,” Horgan sums up the range of what works on the platform today.
The movement is below the top. Alongside Ms. Rachel, other names from YouTube are reaching the hundreds of millions of hours. Salish & Jordan Matter racked up 99 million hours, 43 million of them in April, the month of launch. Mark Rober's show CrunchLabs has 81 million hours behind it, and Danny Go! added 54 million on a single season of five episodes and stayed in the Top 10 for three months. When Netflix first published its data in 2023, four of the ten most-watched shows were already of YouTube origin. Today, according to Horgan, this is documented across the entire catalogue: “creators are doing huge business on Netflix”.
Netflix licenses creators as brands
The route from YouTube to Netflix is not a chance discovery. Horgan describes it as licensing deals with established creators who already have an operational set-up and a devoted, not just large, audience, and whose content is valuable and distinctive enough for the platform. Netflix positions itself as the opposite of YouTube. It frames itself as the place where parents let their children watch with a clear conscience, aiming at Generation Z, which grew up in an unregulated digital childhood and is now concerned about its safety.
It is the same logic we see in other corners of the market in companies that build brands with rights and distribution around creators. A creator with a loyal audience and a functioning operation becomes a licensable asset that a premium platform acquires much as it would the rights to an established franchise. The ambition to stretch kids' content into global distribution is also what drives Moonbug, the company that owns CoComelon.
CoComelon dropped out of the top ten
CoComelon is precisely what shows the model is changing. The original YouTube hit, which shaped Netflix's kids' viewing for years, dropped out of the Top 10, and its new spin-offs CoComelon Lane and JJ’s Animal Time are so far pulling weakly. The nursery-rhyme format for the youngest is losing ground and is being replaced by live-action, educational and creator-led production.
Even so, the bet on creators has a ceiling that Horgan does not yet see confirmed. “Kids and family creators have already proved they can perform at a very high level on Netflix, and I expect that to continue. What I’m watching now is whether broader-skewing creators can deliver to the same standard,” she says. In other words, creators for kids and families have succeeded, and the question is whether creators with a broader, more adult audience can do the same.
Netflix also expanded its analysis to live-action content in H1 2026 and immediately hit a second surprise. Nickelodeon's classic live-action library racked up over 900 million hours, with Henry Danger and The Thundermans each passing 200 million on their own. Kids' Netflix today therefore rests simultaneously on established animated franchises, on catalogue live-action production and on creators from YouTube.
For Netflix, viewing is the currency. “We focus on engagement because we believe it’s the single best indicator of customer satisfaction with our offering, and it is a leading indicator for retention and acquisition over time,” Netflix content chief Ted Sarandos said in spring 2024 on an earnings call. In that currency, YouTube creators are now among the strongest performers in the kids' library. And YouTube is, after all, the most-watched television in the US, so the pool of talent and audience that Netflix draws on is only growing.
Comments