Children will influence over $21B in US back-to-school spending
Generation Alpha are the new focus for marketers world-wide, with kids born in 2010 or later exerting a powerful influence on household spending. In a recent survey by Hotwire, 81% of parents in the US reported that the opinions of their children played a significant role in their spending, particularly when it came to tech. Generation Alpha are influencing household decisions all year round – but never more so than during the all-important back-to-school period.
Jimmy Butchart is SuperAwesome’s new Commercial Operations head
YouTube is one of the biggest challenges facing brands and content owners who engage with children. Although it has a vast audience of kids, reaching that audience is filled with risk. This means that for brands, content owners, content creators and others, there is a lack of tools designed for 6-13 YouTube engagement.
COPPA-compliant programmatic advertising with our KidSafe Filter
The recent enforcement action against Oath’s ad exchange (formerly known as AOL) for breaching COPPA has put a spotlight on programmatic advertising to children. The case highlighted some important issues including the fact that using the ‘COPPA flag’ does not work. In fact, the only guaranteed way for advertisers to be compliant in programmatic ad buying is through a dedicated kidtech solution.
Podcast: #Kidtech Episode 6: Emma Scott, CEO Beano Studios
In Episode 6 of #Kidtech, Emma Scott, CEO of Beano Studios, speaks to Dylan Collins about how a long career of disruption has culminated in building a digital platform around the UK’s best-loved and longest-running children’s comic. Beano Studios, a rebellious entertainment network powered by creativity, data and insight, has succeeded where others have failed, integrating their historic brand into the new digital ecosystem.
TikTok COPPA fine ups the stakes in kids digital privacy
The FTC dramatically upped the ante on COPPA enforcement this week with a record-setting fine of $5.7m against the app formerly known as Musical.ly (now TikTok). The settlement says TikTok breached COPPA by knowingly collecting personal information from children without first obtaining parental consent, as required by the law.
How we scale our kid-safe technology using Kubernetes
At SuperAwesome, we build technology that makes the internet safer for kids. Every month, we handle requests from hundreds of millions of kids located all around the world. These kids use their devices moderately in the morning, a little bit during the day, and a lot in the evening. As a result, we had to build highly scalable systems that would respond automatically to that demand.
Podcast: #Kidtech Episode 5: Rob Lowe, LEGO Senior Global Director – Digital Consumer Engagement
In Episode 5 of #KidTech LEGO’s Senior Global Director for Digital Consumer Engagement, Rob Lowe, discusses LEGO Life, their groundbreaking social network for kids with SuperAwesome’s Dylan Collins.
Kids content creators need another online video platform
Last week I talked about our financials in an interview with Dean Takahashi at Venturebeat. In 2018 SuperAwesome hit a revenue run-rate of $64m. This year we’ll take that same measure to almost $100m. Every month our various kidtech products are powering safe, private digital engagements for over 500m kids as they play games, watch videos and engage with their communities online.
Kids trend alert: Gacha, Dollify, and digital dolls
Are dolls going digital? PopJammers are going crazy about Gacha and Dollify.
PopJam, our safe-social platform for under 13s, has always been a place for kids to share their latest trends in a safe and creative community.
Through spikes of activity in November and December we saw several new trends appearing. In our Kids Trend Predictions for 2019 blog we mentioned that Gacha was a kid-predicted trend, particularly for YouTube content – and Gacha has truly arrived.
