Kids spend almost as much time on TikTok as YouTube: the Battle for Gen Z's Attention
Missing Hey Arnold and Dexter's Laboratory... Instead of counting sheep to fall asleep, kids are counting TikTok dance moves. Digital safety company Qustodio collected data from 60K families with kids ages 4-15 in the US, UK, and Spain. Qustodio found that kids spend:
- 85 minutes/day watching YouTube: The video OG boasts 69% of US kids, 74% of UK kids, and 88% of Spanish kids as users — they're watching 2X as many YouTube vids/day as they did in 2016.
- 80 minutes/day watching TikTok: The Chinese short video app that exploded in popularity had 16.5% of US kids hooked in February. And engagement is intense: TikTok doubled kids’ social app use in 2019 and doubled their screen time in 2020.
- Lockdown jump: Closed schools and no playdates led to a surge — in mid-April, kids watched 97 minutes/day of YouTube and 95 minutes/day of TikTok (and parents had 192 minutes of peace).
Winning the tech trifecta... That's growth, engagement, and profits. While YouTube is winning on sheer numbers of kids, TikTok's almost got it beat on engagement — and it's growing fast, with the most quarterly downloads of any app ever. Plus, its parent ByteDance reportedly turned a $3B profit last year.
It's the battle of the attention spans... Kids are watching waaayy more videos in 80 minutes on TikTok than in 85 on YouTube. While both platforms are mostly user-generated, YouTube has a tough challenge in the battle for Gen Z's attention:
- Millennials (24-39): Grew up with Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network and Disney TV shows (episodes around 20 minutes long).
- 1st Wave Gen Z (16-23): Grew up with more YouTube videos (around 12 minutes long, on average).
- 2nd Wave Gen Z (1-15) — We're calling them "Gen T" now for TikTok: Growing up with short-form mobile content embodied by TikTok, whose videos are just 16 seconds long on average.