Inside Moonbug, the YouTube channel watched by 500 million toddlers
How did a small production company in north London become the envy of Disney, Warner Bros and Netflix?
Imagine, if you need to, that you wake up and find yourself charged with looking after a young child for the day. You do everything you’re supposed to: you read them stories, you take them to the park, you give them healthy snacks of carrot sticks and apple slices. You indulge them in their endless games of make-believe, you answer their very many questions and you genuinely try your hardest to remain patient and attentive. But as the day wears on, they start to get tired and you start to get tired and, eventually, all you both really want is to stop, sit down in a café and quietly kill some time watching children’s TV. Some parents – some pure, sinless parents – will probably shoot you disapproving looks. But, well, whatever. You take out your phone and, as the eyes of the child beside you light up, you ask them what they would like to watch.
Well, what would they like to watch? There is, in 2022, a good chance that they are fans of CoComelon, a series in which CGI children with outsized heads and saucer eyes learn about the world around them through the medium of song. Or they might like Blippi, a show in which a childlike man with orange glasses visits various places, from fire stations to chocolate factories, and enthuses about what he sees in a high, nasal voice. They may also love Arpo (a robot babysitter), or Go Buster (an anthropomorphic bus), or Gecko’s Garage (literally, a gecko with a garage).
These shows are all bright, benign and, for children of a particular age, highly digestible. They also have some other things in common. Rather than being broadcast on terrestrial television channels such as the BBC or via established streaming services such as Netflix or Amazon Prime, these titles can all be found on YouTube. Here they have gained incredible popularity with children all around the world. For example, one episode of Go Buster has been viewed two million times over the past three months. A video in which Blippi learns about dinosaurs has been viewed more than eight million times in just four weeks. The CoComelon YouTube channel has 130 million subscribers and its computer-generated videos of swollen-headed infants smiling along to nursery rhymes have now been viewed more than 120 billion times. Which, just for scale, is more than Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Beyoncé and Katy Perry’s official YouTube channel views combined.
Moonbug co-founder René Rechtman
FREDERIK LENTZ ANDERSEN
Moonbug co-founder John Robson
JULIE EDWARDS
But the most important thing that CoComelon, Blippi and many more have in common is that they are all owned and operated by a London-based company called Moonbug. Founded in 2018 by a pair of entertainment executives named René Rechtman and John Robson, Moonbug was created to test a hypothesis both men had quietly come to believe. Namely that the two to five-year-old demographic was being neglected by the big players such as Disney. But by going on YouTube, finding content that was doing well with this age group and then acquiring it, Rechtman and Robson sensed they could build a pre-school entertainment powerhouse. This plan was greeted with some derision within the industry. YouTube – a free site where anybody can upload more or less anything – was still regarded as an amateurish place where the production value of original content was patchy and where novelty, rather than quality, determined a video’s success. “People were laughing at us when we started,” says Rechtman.
He and Robson ploughed on, however, acquiring the rights to YouTube shows like Blippi and CoComelon with little fanfare. They built up Moonbug’s roster while, thanks to Covid, parents around the globe were finding that working from home while juggling childcare meant their attitudes towards screentime relaxed significantly. Demand for programmes that could hold the attention of young children swelled. Moonbug, with increasing momentum, became a serious proposition. Its YouTube shows were attracting billions of views every month, while new merchandise deals were seemingly done daily. (Blippi backpacks! CoComelon Deluxe Family House Playsets!)
In a short space of time, Rechtman and Robson had, in fact, built their pre-school entertainment powerhouse, one with direct access to the hearts and minds of millions of children. And then, at the end of last year, Moonbug was acquired by a private equity-backed investment company for a reported $3 billion (£2.25 billion). Rechtman smiles. “People,” he says, “aren’t laughing any more.”
The Moonbug offices are in Camden on the Regent’s Canal. About 300 people work here – the bulk of whom were hired over the past year or so – and another 100 are in Los Angeles, where Moonbug has an office. They are overwhelmingly young and perky. Some are involved in marketing, others in production, dubbing Moonbug’s 20 or so shows into dozens of languages. I meet Rechtman and Robson in a private office. Rechtman, who is from Copenhagen, is tall, spindly, with a goatee beard and sharp, direct manner. Robson is from Cambridge, has a shaggy, bookish look and speaks with a measured thoughtfulness. Moonbug, he always tries to explain to people, is kind of analogous to Calpol. “In that, if you don’t have young children, you’ve never heard of it. But 100 per cent of people who do have young children know exactly what it is.”
Both men are 51. Rechtman is the former president of international at Maker Studios, a conglomeration of YouTube channels designed to appeal to millennials. Robson was managing director of a company that distributed kids’ TV shows. They are not themselves fizzing with ideas for new children’s programming. “Neither of us are creative geniuses,” admits Robson. Instead, they have built Moonbug into the phenomenon it is by adopting a clinical, calculated approach to acquiring content.
CoComelon
Before founding Moonbug it was clear to them, says Rechtman, that more and more children were turning to YouTube for entertainment. So they dug into the data – “data” is a word they both use a lot – and discovered something they found remarkable. Of the 100 most popular YouTube channels for children worldwide, the vast majority were operated by small, independent outfits. “They were mom’n’pop shops,” Rechtman says. And in more than a few cases, literally so. CoComelon was created by an American couple who first started making 3D nursery rhyme videos as a hobby. Little Baby Bum, another hugely popular YouTube channel acquired by Moonbug and featuring similarly animated children and songs, was founded by a British husband and wife who wanted to make videos their own young children would enjoy. The character of Blippi was born after the man who plays him, a young US Air Force veteran called Stevin John, decided to create some fun videos for his nephew. They were all ordinary people who had thrown something they had created onto YouTube and, over time, found an audience.
From a business perspective, says Rechtman, this was all “too good to be true” because the intellectual property, or IP, was owned by these small outfits rather than big media players. “So there was an opportunity to step in and professionalise that space,” says Robson. In 2018, they bought Little Baby Bum for a reported $9 million. In 2020, they acquired Blippi and CoComelon for a reported $120 million. These sound like big figures but really, says Robson, it’s all good value. “We’ve been able to pick up and grow such powerful pieces of IP without anyone being interested.”
They are also open about the role that Covid-19 has played in helping their business. An increase in watch-time coincided with lockdowns around the world, Robson explains. “The screen became a de facto babysitter.”
The use of data is not limited to how Moonbug acquires content. Data also helps direct the content itself. Because it is now possible to track how viewers respond to the YouTube videos in front of them – by monitoring what they click on and when – Rechtman and Robson have been able to build a very detailed understanding of what their young audience likes, almost as though they are at their side, observing them, silent and invisible. “So for example, you can look at a video on YouTube and see where people stop watching it,” says Robson. “And if at that moment a yellow bus appears and previously you’d had a red bus, but now you’ve had a 50 per cent drop-off, then that starts to tell you that yellow buses are less appealing than red buses.” This information is fed back to the teams who create the content for Moonbug’s YouTube channels and who factor it into their work accordingly. “This isn’t cheating or tricking children,” says Robson. “It’s working out what it is they really like and then giving them more of it.”
Blippi
This ability to glean what children want by monitoring their viewing habits is, they both say, a good thing. For example, young kids all around the world, they noticed, respond to vehicles. So Moonbug gave them more. “We created a spin-off of one of our shows and made Buster the Bus,” says Rechtman. “And that’s because we have the insight that there is a huge demand for vehicles.” Similarly, they began to notice that their audience really liked seeing animals in familiar, urban settings. So they developed an entire show called Lellobee City Farm. They say they are freeing their audiences from simply having to take what they are given by the adult “tastemakers” who have always commissioned kids’ TV. “Our content is being consumed democratically, and what I mean by that is the children and parents are picking it,” says Robson. “It’s not being broadcast to them [in the traditional way]. So the consumption is highly engaged.”
This is all true. And it is, as they say, a far cry from forcing yourself to sit through hours of whatever happens to be on TV simply because there is nothing else available. But Rechtman and Robson are also asking parents to do something that has not always been easy, which is to embrace YouTube as a platform. To understand why this is a challenge, we first need to appreciate that in order for a traditional piece of pre-school programming to be commissioned, made and broadcast on television there is a legal requirement for it to tick certain boxes. “It would have to address diversity and inclusivity and it would have to have an educational purpose,” explains Greg Childs, a director and producer of children’s programming who serves as the editorial director of the Children’s Media Conference. “Whether it’s CBeebies or Channel 5’s Milkshake! in the UK, or PBS Kids and Nickelodeon in the US, they will all have educational consultants putting together curricula for the programmes.”
In other words, you can’t just make anything. There is tight regulation. But on YouTube, this isn’t the case. There are no comparable requirements to meet if you want to stick up videos in the hope of attracting enough clicks to start earning advertising revenue. And this is a problem that has blighted YouTube for years as cheap, poorly made and often cynically calculated videos aimed at kids have still managed to attract millions of views. Nellie McQuinn is head of production at Moonbug and, at the age of 19, began recording and posting children’s videos on YouTube. “I was presenting a show called Nellie and Ned, which was myself and a puppet. I spent a lot of time on camera chatting to that puppet,” she says, chuckling. “We were making content in my living room with a bit of green cloth put up behind us and doing everything ourselves.”
McQuinn found herself one of a growing number of people drawn into the cottage industry of creating YouTube kids’ content. To pay the bills and keep her small operation alive, she took on jobs that involved producing novelty stuff. There was, for a while, an online fad for “hot knife” videos. “You’d take a knife and you’d heat it up with a blowtorch and then you’d just cut through things. You’d cut through toys, cut through food, cut through mobile phones and laptops. It was weird.”
Then, she continues, there were the weird cosplay videos she would make – chaotic melodramas that ripped off popular characters while appealing to children’s fever-dream imaginations. “We’d dress up as superheroes and it was like a sort of soap opera for children: ‘Elsa’s pregnant and Spider-Man’s the dad.’ A colleague of mine, on his first day on the job, had to dress as Batman and sit in a bath of slime. I remember thinking, ‘What are we doing? This is ridiculous.’ ”
These fads all passed. But they were popular and they were prevalent, which is part of the reason that Rechtman and Robson encountered so many sniggers when they announced they would build their business off the back of kids’ YouTube content. McQuinn ended up working with Little Baby Bum and then, upon its acquisition, for Moonbug. She says that the quality and quantity of stuff being made for children on YouTube has increased dramatically and that she is now proud of all the shows she is involved in. “We’re working hard to legitimise it,” she says.
Moonbug makes a point of stressing that its shows are conceived to teach its young audience “compassion, empathy and resilience” – none of its content involves Elsa impregnations or the use of blowtorches wow wow wow– and the whole point of the venture is to win parents’ trust, so acquiring popular but tacky YouTube programmes would be self-defeating. “If we don’t think kids can get entertained in an intelligent way, and help develop their life skills, then we won’t do it,” says Rechtman. “We have access to more than 500 million kids and their families around the globe and with that comes a lot of responsibility.”
One big advantage that Moonbug has over more traditional providers is the speed and efficiency of its production. None of its shows are what you would call aesthetically sophisticated, but they are comparatively easy to make. This, believes Greg Childs, is partly the reason that the success of Moonbug’s shows has come as a surprise to a lot of people. “There are many in the industry who just did not understand why these things could be so popular when they themselves were making beautifully crafted shows that were costing hundreds of thousands of pounds per episode,” he says. And these lovely-looking productions really do take time. “With a show like Teletubbies, it could take between four and six years from coming up with the idea and the point when it hits the screens.”
Moonbug, on the other hand, can produce shows much more quickly and at a much lower cost. Is this, then, the future of children’s television? Agile, responsive, data-driven programming that’s stacked high and given away online to a huge global audience in exchange for online ad revenue and merchandise deals? Kay Benbow was the controller of CBeebies between 2010 and 2017, which I suppose makes her one of the adult “tastemakers” Rechtman thinks we have been in thrall to for too long. Benbow believes that while the quality of kids’ programming on YouTube has increased over the years – “It’s no longer the Wild West” – it’s also a good opportunity to stop and think about what we really want children to watch. “You can put children in front of anything and they’ll probably watch it,” she says. “But good-quality content that inspires them and helps them understand the world? I think that’s really important. And we still need to have that.”
She would be sceptical if Moonbug relied too heavily on data when developing its shows. “Red buses or yellow buses? That feels quite basic,” she says. Rather than tweaking vehicle colours, she would hope that more important questions were also being asked. “What is the show doing for the child? What is it explaining? Is it engaging? And so I would say it requires a little more than just data that shows when the children have switched off. It’s also about understanding why.”
Benbow also wonders if the universality of Moonbug’s output is worth thinking about. None of its shows are set anywhere real or recognisable. This is part of its business model, as it allows the content to be dubbed and consumed around the world. “But I think it’s quite important to have content that reflects the world in which you live, your country and culture. That’s what resonates.”
More than anything, though, Benbow says that when it comes to TV, young children deserve the very best. When she commissioned a reboot of The Clangers they used stop-motion animation, not because it was quick but because the results were distinctive and charming. Michael Palin did the narration, not because toddlers know who Michael Palin is but because she felt that they deserved him nonetheless.
The good news, for young children and their parents alike, is that it is not an either/or choice. Moonbug is not stopping anybody from watching The Clangers. It is not stopping parents from telling their children that they have watched enough TV for today and it’s time to do something else. In fact, increasingly, Moonbug has been taking its programmes beyond YouTube. Deals have been struck with Netflix, Amazon Prime and the BBC to screen Moonbug shows and develop new content.
Rechtman reclines on the office sofa and yawns. The past four years have been intense. “You’re literally sprinting a marathon,” he says. Last month, Moonbug shows attracted nine billion views. On a recent trip to Los Angeles, he says he was taken aback by the hysteria surrounding the company.
“Our toys, our music – any product is the bestselling product in the world,” he says, slapping the sofa for emphasis. The CoComelon Bedtime JJ Doll was, according to Moonbug, the No 1 selling toy in North America at Christmas. “They’re sold out the second they go on the shelves. Walmart, Target, Amazon, Hamleys, everywhere. We’re much bigger than I realised. Every platform talks about us, whether it’s HBO, Warner, Disney. They say, ‘You’ve created a phenomenon,’ ” says Rechtman, before taking a breath and letting it out slowly. “We’ve created a phenomenon.”
