Are Streamers Giving Up on Kids Programming Too Quickly?
New data from Ampere Analysis shows that parents with children are less likely to cancel a a streaming service.
The question on the minds of basically every streaming provider these days is how to get viewers to think of their service as indispensable. Streamers that can make this case to customers have a much better chance of being retained over the long haul, and executives know customer retention is an important factor in making their services profitable. New data from Ampere Analysis shows that children can be an important decider in whether or not families cancel their streaming subscriptions, a data point that has lessons for services that are trying to cut back on their children’s offerings.
Key Details:
- Viewers without children are 8% more likely to be at risk of churn than viewers with children.
- Commissions of streaming original kids’ programming fell by 18% between 2022 and 2023.
- Many companies see the dominance of YouTube among kids as a compelling reason to create fewer kids shows.
The numbers from Ampere show that as of the first quarter of 2024, 36% of all streaming viewers without children could be identified as at risk of churning. Among families with kids, however, the number drops to 28%, a sign that children have a definite say in whether or not a family decides to keep a streaming subscription — or that families with kids are too distracted by other things to worry about dropping streaming services on a weekly basis.
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This data could lead one to assume that streamers are doing everything they can to increase their children’s programming, but other numbers included in Ampere’s latest data drop prove that if anything, the opposite is happening. Commissions for on-demand original shows in the children and family category dropped by 18% between 2022 and 2023.
One big reason for this is the dominance of YouTube among kids. A report from late 2023 found that YouTube made up a higher proportion of streaming time among viewers aged 2-11 than any subscription streaming service, including Netflix. In July, YouTube made up for more than 10% of all TV watched in the United States total, the first time any streaming video platform had surpassed that threshold.
How Can Streamers Deploy Kids Content in a Cost-Effective Way?
Companies like Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount have already begun trying to deploy their kids’ content in a way that doesn’t cost quite so much money. Each company has shut down a kids streamer this year; Paramount shuttered Noggin in July, and WBD announced the end of Boomerang in early August. Their content was moved to Paramount+ and Max, respectively, allowing their parent companies to save on back-end costs and drive more customers to their flagship streamers.
The data from Ampere offers another way for on-demand services to build up their kids’ programming without spending a huge amount of money: licensing titles and renewing previous shows. In the same period of time between 2022 and 2023 that saw commissions for on-demand originals fall by 18%, non-original or acquired titles available to stream grew by 4%.
Renewals are continuing to account for a greater share of commissions in the children and family category. Ampere found that renewals accounted for 50% of commissions of titles for kids in the first half of 2024, the first time that first-run programming didn’t account for more than half of commissions in the past five years.
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It’s always more expensive to create something new than it is to license an existing show or movie from its originator, and media executives know this quite well. It’s also less expensive to create a new season of a show than it is to start a new program from scratch, which is a good way for streaming operators to navigate the conundrum of keeping kids’ programming available to reduce churn, while simultaneously not throwing good money after bad in trying to compete with YouTube.
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