How CoComelon Captures Our Children’s Attention

tags

Attention Economy

Notes

CoComelon episodes, they said, were put together with the aid of spreadsheets showing the most popular search terms on YouTube. “Ideally, you want to come up with an engaging idea that has a bunch of those search terms in it,”

quarterly YouTube streams were at more than sixty billion minutes. Still, according to Bloomberg, Moonbug came in under its earnings targets last year.

the writer responsible for the five highest-performing episodes of 2022 was making seventy-five thousand dollars a year when he got laid off

Three people also brought up an executive’s dictum about endings: even if an episode was soundtracked by a lullaby, the characters should not go to sleep at the end of it. If they did, kids at home might be encouraged to press Pause, and put the screen away.

Jeffrey Katzenberg, a co-founder of DreamWorks—which is reportedly developing the CoComelon movie—has suggested that ninety per cent of animation work will someday be done by A.I.

the TV that is best for kids is whatever a parent will sit down and watch with them.

anxiety I have about my kids’ screen time comes mainly from sublimated disappointment in myself.

When it comes to the shows we allow our children to watch, we are afraid of—what, exactly? That our kids’ capacity for deep thought will be blunted by compulsive screen use? That they’ll lose their ability to sit with the plain fact of existence, to pay attention to the world as it is, to conceive of new possibilities? That they’ll grow up to be just like us, only worse?