This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on September 14th, 2022. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Platforms like YouTube earn billions from children using their service. But the big grey zones that arise are something neither influencers nor the platforms want to tackle.

“Today we’re launching YouTube Kids, the first Google product built from the ground up with the littlest ones in mind. The app makes it safer and easier for children to find videos on subjects they want to explore.”

That was the messaging back in 2015, when YouTube and its parent Google first created a dedicated app for children. Before that, children had to click around the video site like everyone else, potentially ending up in unsuitable corners of the internet.

There was only one problem — children didn’t have to use the app.

It was just as easy to keep watching the way they had before, except now YouTube had an alibi that the main site was only for adults. The age of the site’s viewers has always been unknown — even if you could make an educated guess about who was watching children’s cartoons for hours on end.

Five years later, YouTube was forced to rework its systems anyway. The US Federal Trade Commission, FTC, hit them with a $170 million fine and pushed through changes where videos made for children had to be treated differently in terms of user comments, and the precision of ads was reduced.

This caused profitability for children’s videos to drop sharply — in many cases by more than half.

If you wonder why video creators don’t want to be classified as making content for children, it is now crystal clear: you make less money. Here is a possible explanation for the actions of Pontus Rasmusson, the influencer SvD has investigated in podcasts and articles.

There is no doubt that Pontus Rasmusson is a children’s idol. But according to YouTube’s systems, he makes videos for adults.

Looking at their own rules, though, you end up in something close to a Catch-22 around Rasmusson — the references to sex make his videos inappropriate for children. At the same time, the audience for the content is obvious. And in that grey zone, nothing happens.

Beyond ad views, YouTubers also make money on the content itself, through what is euphemistically called “collaborations”. These are ads dressed up as regular content, handled directly between the company and the video creator. YouTube as a platform cannot regulate this.

But the fact that Pontus Rasmusson “collaborates” with toy company Moose Toys gives a clear indication of who both parties to the transaction believe his audience to be.

The question this raises is how parents are supposed to know what their children are watching. In a comment to SvD, YouTube says that they “give parents the ability to control which YouTube content their children can see, including the ability to allow only content from trusted partners” — provided you use the YouTube Kids app.

But, as noted, not all children do.

Not in 2015 when the app came out, and not in 2022 either. Why would they start? The video content for children is still on the main site too — and then some.

The possibility of controlling the video offering for your children — channel by channel — is also wholly unrealistic for the average parent. It would be like having to pre-listen to every song on Spotify before the children could hear it. Theoretically possible — sure. But in practice both impossible and undesirable for most.

All platforms that involve children have an interest in painting pictures of families sitting on the sofa watching educational videos together. It probably looks like that sometimes. But the most common scenario is that the children are sitting alone, choosing what to watch, far from parents’ gaze and attention. The solutions need to start from reality and how it actually works, rather than from a glamorised ideal society.

Companies like YouTube and Instagram tend to say these are hard problems to solve. The precision of content judgements is not always as good as one might wish. That’s true. But this is a problem that did not have to exist in the first place.

You don’t have to mix content for children and adults together. You can restrict access to videos with various kinds of age verification. But all the economic incentives go against doing that. It is more profitable to put the burden on every individual parent than to fix the problem you yourself helped create.

SvD’s investigation of YouTuber Pontus Rasmusson shows that it is still close to a lawless land for children online. And the economic incentives point to it staying that way.

He is one of Sweden’s biggest YouTubers — among children. But parents accuse him of tricking their fans out of money. And why does he mix the child-friendly clips with constant sex references? Alice Aveshagen and Henning Eklund portray the Pontus Rasmusson phenomenon. A documentary from SvD.