Some quick background on Cocomelon.
It started in 2006 as a children’s education YouTube channel called That’sMeOnTv.com.
Korean-American Jay Jeon and his wife created the channel with animated alphabet songs to teach children how to read. The channel rebranded twice before becoming Cocomelon in 2018. By this time, Jeon and a team of animators in California were creating 3D-animated videos of kids doing kids things while singing public domain nursery rhymes.
As more parents turned to YouTube to entertain their children, Cocomelon rocketed up the charts. It is currently the 3rd most popular channel on YouTube (with 174 million subscribers) and it does insane numbers. The channel has eight videos with over 2 billion views including “Bath Song”, “Wheels on the Bus”, “Baa Baa Black Sheep” and “Old MacDonald” (yes, I’ve heard all of these many many times).
By 2019, Jeon was making over $100 million a year in ad revenue.
Cocomelon cracked the YouTube algorithm the same way slot machines cracked gambling or TikTok cracked social video. It pushes every psychological button to keep a child’s attention:
Cuts every 2-3 seconds
So so so many different colors
Lots of movement and panning on the screen
Popular nursery rhymes remixed with upbeat tunes
The sound of babies randomly cooing in the background (the kid equivalent of how radio ads play sirens as a way to grab your attention because people are always on the lookout for sirens while driving).
Cocomelon is the entertainment version of a Doritos chip: perfectly engineered digital junk food, with many parents complaining that *“*it’s responsible for their children’s behavioral problems, including anger issues, ADHD, autism and speech delays”.
I’m not saying that there is direct causation but here’s a random 5-second GIF from Cocomelon that — even without sound — shows how it’s an overstimulation machine.
In 2022, the New York Times published a fascinating write-up on Moonbug Entertainment and how the studio creates videos (its kid show portfolio includes Little Baby Bum, Blippi, Playtime with Twinkle and The Sharksons among others).
Before getting into Moonbug’s process, take a moment to remember Brumm’s process. He is basing his work on real-life social play and his “5am” interactions with his children. For each idea, he navigates a writing maze and incorporates adult themes to develop the ideal 7-minute co-viewing experience.
It is craftsmanship.
Contrast everything I just wrote with Moonbug’s “audience research day”:
Once a month, children are brought to [a London studio], one at a time, and shown a handful of episodes to figure out exactly which parts of the shows are engaging and which are tuned out.
For anyone older than 2 years old, the team deploys a whimsically named tool: the Distractatron.
It’s a small TV screen, placed a few feet from the larger one, that plays a continuous loop of banal, real-world scenes — a guy pouring a cup of coffee, someone getting a haircut — each lasting about 20 seconds. Whenever a youngster looks away from the Moonbug show to glimpse the Distractatron, a note is jotted down.
“It’s not mega-interesting, what’s on the Distractatron,” said Maurice Wheeler, who runs the research group. “But if they aren’t fully focused, they might go, ‘Oh, what’s that?’ and kind of drift over. We can see what they’re looking at and the exact moment when they got distracted.”
I repeat: a “Distractatron”.
Brumm recently launched the Behind Bluey podcast. In it, Brumm talks to various team members (animators, voice actors etc.) about creating the show. I haven’t listened to all of the episodes yet but I’m guessing…THEY DON’T USE A F—ING DISTRACTATRON!!!
Here is more from the NYT:
Outside this office, some 270 employees are working on Moonbug shows in the company’s headquarters, a sleek, open-plan space on one floor of a four-story building beside a canal in Camden Town, a district in northwest London. Pre- and post- production are handled here and in the United States, where the company has another 120 staffers, mostly in Los Angeles. The company works with animators around the world.
Those hands are nothing if not data driven. [Moonbug Entertainment CEO] René Rechtman has a background in private equity and is more of an algorithm guy than an artist. Shows at Moonbug are honed in ways that leave little to chance, and audience research commences long before any episode gets near the Distractatron.
A data and analytics team sifts constantly through YouTube numbers to determine exactly what resonates. Should a girl wear black jeans or blue jeans? Should the music be louder or softer? Should the bus be yellow or red?
Yellow, is the answer.
“Kids love yellow buses around the world,” said David Levine, the chief content officer at Moonbug. “In some countries, yellow buses are actually used to transport prisoners. But still, kids around the world love to see yellow buses and kids on yellow buses.”
Infants are also enamored with objects covered in a little dirt, like they’ve been rolling around on the ground. And they’re fascinated by minor injuries. Not broken legs or gruesome wounds. More like small cuts that require Band-Aids.
“The trifecta for a kid would be a dirty yellow bus that has a boo-boo,” Levine said. “Broken fender, broken wheel, little grimace on its face.”
Moonbug has Cocomelon down to a science. It is an assembly line — a very lucrative assembly line — that is feeding YouTube’s algorithm and Netflix’s kid show tab.