YouTube's ties to videos with children just got even more awkward. In the first week of 2019, videos featuring children under the age of 13 brought in three times as many views as any other content, according to a new study by Pew Research Center released Thursday.
The details come a week after YouTube parent company Google reached a multimillion-dollar settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission over alleged violations of child data privacy laws on YouTube. The settlement followed an FTC investigation into whether Google was protecting children's data. YouTube doesn't intend for its main platform to be used by those under 13 and directs a younger audience to use YouTube Kids.
Pew analyzed videos published in the first week of January by 43,770 channels, all of which featured more than 250,000 subscribers. Collectively, the channels in the Pew study posted nearly a quarter-million videos and spanned 48,486 hours.
"A single person watching videos for eight hours a day (with no breaks or days off) would need more than 16 years to watch all the content posted by just the most popular channels on the platform during a single week," the study added.
In other findings, 18% of English-language videos analyzed in the study were related to gaming. These videos were often longer in length than other content. Also, videos with keywords such as "Fortnite," "prank" or "worst" received five times as many views as videos not mentioning those words.
Earlier this year, Wired reported on how pedophiles were using the comment section of YouTube videos with children to lure in other predators.
Neither Pew Research Center nor YouTube immediately respond to a request for comment.
