Maren (9) takes her tablet at the kitchen table in Delft and opens YouTube. The newest video from MRbeast is immediately at the top of her recommendations. She would not call herself a really fan, but he is just there when she goes to YouTube. In the video that is playing now, MRBeast with his girlfriend goes on romantic dates, one with a price tag of 1 dollar and one of half a million. “They got all Disney for themselves,” says Maren. “That was the first time in the entire Disney history.” For someone like MrBeast, the 27-year-old American James ‘Jimmy’ Donaldson, such a big outing is quite standard. After all, he always does “all cool things.”
Twenty years after its foundation, YouTube is still the largest video platform in the world, and for many children the starting point of their online life. Of the twenty largest YouTube channels, eleven focus on children, from toddlers to adolescents. YouTube is just as obvious for this generation of children that it used to be. The platform is ready with an endless stream of videos, tailored to their attention and interest.
That is clearly visible at MrBeast, the largest YouTuber in the world with 409 million subscribers. His videos are designed to grab the attention of young viewers from the first second. Not only the content is tailored to them, but also the tone. MrBeast shouts almost continuously, the screen blinks with fast shots and flashes of light. MrBeast has mastered the YouTube algorithm completely; His most popular videos are hyperbolic spectacles that revolve around large amounts of money, competition and survival – often all that at the same time.
For example, Maren remembers a video in which he builds a lifelike version of the chocolate factory Sjakie and the chocolate factory. Everything is: slides of chocolate, fountains, candy castles, a conveyor belt full of goodies. “And then there are a few people who have found a ticket, just like in the real film. And then they go there and they all have to endure challenges. And whoever remains, wins,” she explains. Great, absurd and straight from the fantasy world of a child.
His productions stem from an equally childish curiosity. What would it be like to be buried alive? Would you be in a bathtub full of snakes if I gave your mother 10,000 dollars? Do you prefer to be trapped in the coldest or in the hottest room in the world? His best viewed video, $ 456,000 Squid Game in real life! (820 million views), the Netflix series mimics Squid Game After with real people and real cash prizes. But without fatal consequences for the ‘disabled’ players.
Maren (9) takes her tablet at the kitchen table in Delft and opens YouTube. The newest video from MRbeast is immediately at the top of her recommendations.
Photos Saskia van den Boom
Her first iPad
She no longer knows when Maren started watching YouTube. According to her mother, she was three years old when she got her first iPad. Her brother also had one, so they would not get a fight about it. She sometimes watches school in the morning. “Usually pretty short,” she says, “but quite long in the evening. I think for 45 minutes.” What she looks changes – which passes by, what stands out. A time limit is not set, but sometimes her parents intervene: “Then they say: stop now.”
“I have had a tablet since I was two, I think,” says Sura (10), at home in The Hague. “So almost all my life.” A time limit is set on her phone. “When the time is over, such a final figure comes into the picture and then I have to turn it off. Daddy did that so that I am not on my phone too much.” On normal days she is allowed for half an hour of screen time, two hours in the weekend. “I usually look at YouTube at the weekend.”
YouTube has become a daily routine for Jan (9) from Amsterdam. First he was always allowed to watch a movie of eight minutes from his father before he went to school. But choosing a video took so long that he had little time left. Now he looks after school for 45 minutes, but with a timer that he sets himself. That helps, he says: “You also have to learn a little what the value of an hour of YouTube.”
I have had a tablet since I was two, I think
Recent research by network media literacy shows that children up to and including the age of six spend an average of 86 minutes a day on digital media, often via TV or tablet. A third already uses a smartphone. According to the Monitor Media usage 7-12 years In 2021, children watched YouTube on average 44 minutes a day, probably more during the Coronalockdown.
37 percent of the parents called YouTube the favorite platform of their child, mainly because of game videos. Maren, Sura and Jan can confirm that. The girls are most likely to look at Lana’s Lifethe channel of YouTuber Lana Rae who makes videos about the game Dress to Impress In the online game world Roblox, in which players put together virtual outfits around a theme, for example ‘Summer party’ or ‘famous movie star’, and assess each other’s looks. “She does challenges, such as those who can make an outfit the fastest or who can best copy a style, or let them vote on her outfit,” says Sura. “Or she makes well-known avatars, such as an emo girl, a rich influencer or a popular Roblox character.”
Jan is in a completely different game corner from YouTube. His favorite maker is FireB0RN, a relatively unknown YouTuber that makes long, analytical videos about strategies and enemies in the action adventure game Hollow Knight. Jan prefers to look at people who play the game for the first time. “I think that is funny, because you see how to discover everything.”
Movies are rarely bored, since there is plenty of offer. “I don’t watch videos completely,” says Sura. “Only the pieces that I like.” Jan plays videos at double speed when he finds it boring. Maren: “If it’s not that fun, I click away again.” After a few minutes often already.
Algorithms have great influence. “If I watch one video from Lana, there will be ten more,” says Maren. She finds that handy: “Then I don’t have to look.” Sura: “If you Dress to Impress Looks, you see more of that. If you watch a lot of eating videos, you also see many food things. ” Children are led by shorts (vertical films of up to 180 seconds), recommendations, thumbnails (the video is announced).
Jan (9) was always allowed to watch a movie of eight minutes from his father before he went to school. But choosing it took so long that he had little time left. Now he looks after school for 45 minutes.
Photo Saskia van den Boom
How to Succed
Mr Beast automatically pops up on the screen of Maren. She points to a thumbnail of a video. “Would you risk drowning for … A very large amount, “she reads. 500,000 dollars.” Then I think: I’d rather just live without money than drown with so much money. ” She has mixed feelings about his videos. “He is doing a bit crazy and shouts a lot.” Yet she came halfway.
It is no coincidence that the videos of MRbeast are so popular. “I have been locked up in a room for five years of my life to study viral videos,” he himself writes in a 36 -page document that leaked last year, entitled ‘How to Succeed at MRBEAST PRODUCTION’. “Twenty to thirty thousand hours later I know quite a bit what makes a YouTube video successful.” He describes how his team of hundreds of employees, located in a gigantic head office of nearly six thousand square meters in North Carolina, makes videos that viewers hold to the end.
As a result, the videos of MRbeast are not just entertainment, but a reflection of the internal logic of YouTube. MrBeast dived deep into the data of the platform, experimented with thumbnails, titles, mounting, voltage arches and timing, and looked what worked and what didn’t. Everything revolved around one goal: to understand how you hold people and satisfy the algorithm. Every second counts, especially in the first minute – the moment when most viewers drop out. That is why his videos are not built up quietly, but in the opening scenes you are overwhelmed with images and sound – a shot dopamine.
YouTube himself sees MrBeast as an example of what is technically and strategically possible on the platform. The scale on which MrBeast operates puts pressure on the online platform to keep innovating. “He constantly challenges us,” says Sam Vergauwen, YouTubes Country Manager In the Benelux. “He wants everything: multiple audio tracks, so that viewers can, for example, select their own language; advertisements in live streams; and automatic dubbing [nasynchronisatie in andere talen]. ”
Overload
What do those hyperactive, endlessly recommended videos do with young viewers? Garth Graham, director of YouTube Health – the part of the platform that must make reliable medical information more accessible – does not want to comment on the effect of MRBeast. “I have not seen any studies that show that one specific maker is addictive,” he says.
Neuropsychologist Marion van den Heuvel emphasizes that the precise effect is difficult to determine, especially because of ethical objections. “We will probably never get watertight proof,” she says. “It is difficult for children to put a scientific examination for a period of half a day before a tablet and see what is happening.”
Van den Heuvel is an associate professor at Tilburg University and investigates how experiences in early childhood influence the development of the children’s brain. Movies can be instructive, she says, “but if you get so much input, you can’t handle it all.” The brain gets overloaded by the constant stream of images, and has to work hard to keep up. With videos meant for babies, she sees that flashy images are combined with words like Apple,, ” blue,, ” tree and green To stimulate English learning. “But the brain of that baby is first busy with: what is this all?”
Graham van YouTube Health points out Platform -wide measures Who has taken the company to protect young viewers: break and bedtime reports that automatically appear after about an hour for users under the age of eighteen. Those reports take over the entire screen, but are easy to click away. In addition, ‘guardrails’ have been introduced to prevent young people from consuming too much content on potentially harmful themes, such as appearance and body weight, money or aggression. The algorithm then limits, for example, recommendations of videos about idealized body types, way to quickly get rich or videos in which people are humiliated in public.
Sura likes to look at Lana’s Life: “She does challenges, such as those who can make an outfit the fastest or let them vote for her outfit”.
Photos Saskia van den Boom
Brain rot
If Sura is on YouTube, it is not really easy to put her iPhone away. “Once you take it, you don’t watch the time anymore. Then I suddenly spend an hour on it, while it looks like it’s only ten minutes.” Shorts in particular are gulping her attention. “Something different every time.”
Her mother sees how that works: “Another sound, I think it is a waste of her time. What do you call that again, if your brain gets over stimulated? Brain rot? ”
“You must have the power over the tablet, not the other way around,” says neuropsychologist Van den Heuvel. “And you have to raise children in that. Because the algorithm only wants one thing: that you keep looking for as long as possible.”
Recognizing stimuli and its influence on your brain is crucial, she says. “It is precisely in this time, in which there are so many incentives, you have to teach children to deal with: am I over -stimulated? Is this relaxed or not? Do I really like what I am watching?”
