From vernacularized commercialism to kidbait : Toy review videos on YouTube and the problematics of the mash-up genre

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rchm20 Journal of Children and Media ISSN: 1748-2798 (Print) 1748-2801 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rchm20 From vernacularized commercialism to kidbait: toy review videos on YouTube and the problematics of the mash-up genre Maarit Jaakkola To cite this article: Maarit Jaakkola (2019): From vernacularized commercialism to kidbait: toy review videos on YouTube and the problematics of the mash-up genre, Journal of Children and Media, DOI: 10.1080/17482798.2019.1693409 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17482798.2019.1693409 © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Published online: 18 Nov 2019. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data From vernacularized commercialism to kidbait: toy review videos on YouTube and the problematics of the mash-up genre Maarit Jaakkola The Nordic Information Centre for Media and Communication Research NORDICOM, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden; Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland ABSTRACT Children’s entertainment has grown massively on YouTube in recent years, and the channels with the most subscriptions and views host content designed for children. This article investigates the toy review genre as present in YouTube videos targeting children. This topic has been discussed previously, most notably in regard to digital parenting and child infringement scandals. This analysis aims to more deeply understand the forms and functions of toy reviews in the contexts of YouTube’s political economy, branding and commercialization, as well as regulation. We analyzed the narrative strategies of 180 videos across 35 toy review channels in order to gain an emic understanding of reviewing. Besides producing repetitive content characterized as “kidbait,”these channels also employ creative aims and strategies to convince adults of the benefits of watching. Toy reviews are, however, a complex hybrid genre mediating children’s commodities and play culture, and more attention should be dedicated to the ethical principles of their production. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 13 February 2019 Revised 12 November 2019 Accepted 12 November 2019 KEYWORDS User-generated content; YouTube; vernacular reviewing; cultural engagement; digital citizenship Introduction Since its launch in 2005, YouTube has become a major video platform that allows ordinary users, “content creators,”to upload videos to specific channels under a chosen username. The platform has over one billion users who watch hundreds of millions of hours of video content on YouTube every day, generating billions of views, more than half of which come from mobile devices (YouTube, 2019). Children are a large and growing audience because they start using YouTube at a very early age. For example, in Sweden, four out of five 2-year-olds use the internet, mostly for watching videos and mostly on a tablet, and their internet use has been consistently increasing (Davidsson & Thoresson, 2017). Family is one of the most popular content categories on YouTube (Lange, 2014; Strangelove, 2010) and it saw immense growth in popularity during the 2010s. Toys, and other material artifacts, have continued to be central to children’s play in the digital era. Among different genres with exposure of toys, reviewing of toys has recently gained CONTACT Maarit Jaakkola [email protected] The Nordic Information Centre for Media and Communication Research NORDICOM, University of Gothenburg, PO Box 713, Gothenburg SE 405 30, Sweden JOURNAL OF CHILDREN AND MEDIA https://doi.org/10.1080/17482798.2019.1693409 © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. popularity. In 2018, the highest earning content creator was the family behind the toy review channel Ryan ToysReview, with 22 million dollars in income (Rawlinson, 2018; Robehmet & Berg, 2018). Since 2017, the channel, with 18 million subscribers, has partnered with a Los Angeles-based start-up, Pocket.watch, for merchandise and marketing, including collectibles, merchandise, and a mobile application (“app”), Tag with Ryan (Pocket.watch, 2018). In the wake of Ryan’s success, toy reviewing has become an established way of communicating about new toys to an audience, and a number of toy (review) channels have emerged, such as Fun Toys Collector Disney Toys Review (11.5 million subscribers in January 2019), Blu Toys Club Surprise (7.2 million subscribers), and Sandaroo Kids (6.2 million subscribers). All these channels have far greater audiences than traditional children’s television programs. This article discusses the “toy review”genre in YouTube videos and relates “toy reviewing”to the cultural economy that the mediation of commodities is embedded in. Mediation of new cultural products unfolds online through intermediaries who are conceived of as ordinary people and becomes legitimized by the accumulated attention they get through views, subscriptions, and algorithmic recommendations. Content that encounters such massive popularity should be taken seriously and included in discussions of children’s media content in order to better understand what constitutes it. Children’s online engagement and the mediation of new cultural products are important especially in an era where publicity accelerates and multiplies the consequences of single communicative actions online. Research questions This article focuses on reviews, in particular vernacular reviews, of which toy reviews constitute one particular subgroup, and is informed by two main research interests. First, given that reviewing toys has developed into a widespread phenomenon on YouTube, we want to understand what kinds of strategies and methods content creators apply when “reviewing”toys on their channels. Second, the fact that the primary audience of these videos are children implies that consequences are of high importance for media education policies, especially when considered alongside the fact that small children’s use of YouTube has been constantly increasing. Understanding what “reviewing”is all about requires conceptualization of the genre. We thus have formulated the following research questions: (1) How do popular online video channels constitute and apply the concept of “reviewing”and what are the most important genre characteristics of toy reviews on YouTube? (2) How can we in theoretical terms describe toy reviewing as a phenomenon of vernacular reviewing; what implications does targeting child audiences have? Three central discussions provide useful contexts for understanding “toy reviewing”, namely, first, the condition of children’scommercialized culture, second, reviewing as part of vernacularity, and, third, the “exploitation genre”of kidbait. Reviewing of toys will be embedded in these contexts before proceeding to an analysis of YouTube toy review channels. 2M. JAAKKOLA Children in commercialized online spaces Marketing and advertising have increasingly infiltrated children’s everyday lives: licensing-based merchandise and explicit promotion have not only become part of traditional mass media such as film and broadcasting, but also children’s use of technology and new media has increased and children’s play has been mediatized (see e.g., Hjarvard, 2004; Johansen, 2018). Advertisers and industry have discovered ways of directly targeting children instead of addressing them through adults (Hjarvard, 2004; Schor, 2004), and children’sinfluence on purchasing choices in families, “kids-fluence”, has increased (Schor, 2004). While persuasion and hidden advertisements targeting children are no new phenomenon (see e.g., Buckingham, 1995), the promotional dimension has become a more inseparable part of children’s media cultures in an era of “content confusion”where boundaries between democratic and commercial communication have been blurred (Einstein, 2016). Simultaneously, commercial or promotional content has become naturalized and acceptable component in even those communication environments where younger people spend their time. Children’s consumer and commercialized cultures have been richly discussed in previous research, but mainly based on institutional media structures where the democratic and promotional cultures are clearly distinguished each other and regulated. Assessing child-focused content related to commercial or promotional cultures has to a great extent dealt with content from professional producers –for example, children’s programs or advertisers –who work according to more or less shared standards and pre-defined categories (Buckingham, 1995,2007; Lange, 2014; Schor, 2004; Seiter, 2005). There is still relatively little knowledge of how (con)fusion content manifests in channels that children are using and how young users are influenced by the mixing up of genres and production modalities. Studies have indicated that young people find it difficult to separate commercial from non-commercial content (e.g., Grimes, 2015; Seiter, 2005), supported by recent findings that young people have difficulties in determining digital news credibility (see e.g., Nygren & Guath, 2019). In the past few years, as family accounts have become more popular in social media, featuring children’severyday life and cultural engagement, pre-teens, toddlers and even infants have more and more often become to public co-producers of content. Family accounts are driven by adults and motivated by performing maternity online and sharing parenting experiences, typically referred to as “sharenting”, mommy blogging and family influencing (Abidin, 2017; Blum-Ross & Livingstone, 2017). As vernacular spaces become perpetuated by commercial interests of platform providers, marketers, and industry, the family content producers have become powerful mediators of commercial messages, or what Davis (2006) calls “promotional intermediaries”(Hunter, 2016). However, instead of emphasizing the character of branded entertainment as a word-of-mouth method of persuasion and means of monetization, prevalent in digital networks (Hudson & Hudson, 2006; Hunter, 2016; Wiedmann, Hennings, & Langner, 2010), the endorsing processes are often presented –not the least by the users themselves –as expressions of enthusiasm, related to creativity, fandom, amateurism, or everyday expertise, or as altruism and aspirations to help others by sharing this experience-based expertise (Edensor, Leslie, Millington, & Rantisi, 2009). Still, indeed, the inclusion of children in the cultural public online sphere may also be connected to listening to children’s authentic voice and JOURNAL OF CHILDREN AND MEDIA 3 promoting their participation, thus diversifying the variety of voices in cultural mediation (Oswell, 2013). Vernacular reviewing The review genre is a form of presentation in which an author creates and delivers an informed opinion about a cultural object to the public (Blank, 2007). Reviews are “public summaries and evaluations that assist readers to be more knowledgeable in their choice, understanding, or appreciation of products or performances,”(Blank, 2007, p. 7) and answer two questions: “what is it?”and “Is it any good?”Discussing criticism, which is considered a “higher”form of reaction than the review (Titchener, 1998), Orlik (2016,p.8) defines the critical process as “knowledgeable comprehension, positive/negative ascertainment, and resulting carefully considered judgement as a means of reasonably estimating the value of the particular work under scrutiny.”While criticism is used to describe an expert’s evaluation of an event, a review is “a report with opinion”, characterized by a more “mundane”approach to the work and typically written for a wider audience by a generalist who qualifies as “an entertainment writer”(Titchener, 1998, p. 3). In the pre-digital era, reviewing was limited to those reviewers and critics employed by media organizations. In early customer reviews that emerged alongside digital technologies, the “reviewer”was a layperson closely associated with the company that initiated the reviews, which never reached a very wide audience. Since the emergence of digital publishing, enabled by the internet and, later on, by social media, the review genre has opened up to basically anyone who is technically able to open an account with an online service. While the classical review has almost exclusively been based on adult-to-adult communication, vernacular reviews frequently include children as (co-)producers, and this alterity makes toy reviews a special case worth looking at. Vernacularity has, in cultural theory, come to refer to non-institutional cultural forms and practices (Edensor et al., 2009; Howard, 2010). Vernacular discourses emerge “from discussions between self-identified smaller communities”within larger communities and have been conceptualized as an expression of alterity with regard to institutional power (Conti, 2013; Howard, 2010), which, in this case, are the professional criticism and review institutions. Being in a dialectical relationship with institutionalized forms of discourse, vernacular discourse emerges through the appropriation of dominant discourses to better suit the vernacular community (Conti, 2013; Howard, 2008). Emic definitions of social phenomena, i.e., definitions that significantly emerge from within and are regulated by acommunity, are needed in order to understand vernacularity. Reviewing, embedded in the ordinary, commonplace, mundane, or everyday practices, is part of “vernacular creativity”that Burgess (2006, p. 206) defines as “the process by which available cultural resources –are recombined in novel ways, so that they are both recognizable because of their familiar elements, and create affective impact through the innovative process of this recombination.”(see also Brownlie & Hewer, 2011) Vernacular creativity is thus “a productive articulation of consumer practices and knowledges –with older popular traditions and communicative practices”(Burgess, 2006, p. 207). Gibbs, Meese, Arnold, Nansen, and Carter (2015) extend this notion of cultural participation and self-representation by introducing the concept of the “platform vernacular”to include the style, grammar and logical specifities that delimit modes of expression or action on the communication 4M. JAAKKOLA platform. “Platform vernaculars”are “shared (but not static) conventions and grammars of communication, which emerge from the ongoing interactions between platforms and users”(Gibbs, et al., 2015, p. 257). Jenkins (2007) identifies in participatory culture the following characteristics: relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong mutual support and informal mentorship between users (that is a transfer of knowledge from the more experienced to newbies), and a feeling among the members that their contributions matter. Toy reviewing is part of such participatory culture and regarded as a type of vernacular reviewing, i.e., a subtype of user-generated content characterized as “cultural produsage”(Bruns, 2008)or“prosumption”(Toffler, 1980). Both of these neologisms refer to the hybridity of reception and production –the first from the words “production”and “usage,”the latter from “production”and “consumption,”–thus implying that groups of people that used to be at the “audience”end of the communication process or cycle of cultural production are now also active producers and mediators of content. When examining review videos, it is relevant to note that YouTube is a multi-purpose platform that does not require or suggest that a particular genre, such as review, should be followed. Making judgements about commodities is, however, part of YouTube videos, which often mix and hybridize genres. Nicoll and Nansen (2018) analyzed the popular genre of unboxing, a type of review video wherein toys, and related products, are unpacked (see also Marsh, 2016). Indeed, reviewing is typically coupled with unpacking products and many creators describe their activities as “unboxing and reviewing.”Nicoll and Nansen (2018) found, in their content analysis of toy unboxing videos (based on multiple coding), that 11 percent of 47 adult-narrated videos (about 5 videos) and 15 percent of 53 child-narrated videos (about 8 videos) included assessment or reviewing. Reviewing is an embedded activity, often coupled with tutorials, tests, play-throughs, humor shows, relaxation videos, and the like. The fluidity of the category means that it is less appropriate to study such videos via quantitative means, for example, by conducting a content analysis. For this reason, and to better capture the quality of reviews, this study adopted a qualitative approach. YouTube pays money for content creators based on the number of views and ad displays. In 2018, content creators eligible to apply for YouTube’s monetizing program were users with a minimum of 1,000 subscribers and at least 4,000 watch hours in the past 12 months (Google, 2019). Besides, income could be generated by selling one’s own merchandise, that is, using the YouTube channel for marketing, doing affiliate marketing (a brand or product pays the content creator a percentage of their sales when users buy their product), or making sponsored videos. In vernacularized commercialism of YouTube (Burgess & Green, 2018), many vloggers typically identify “product reviews”as a good way of increasing income (see e.g., Ritvars, 2018). Because of ambiguity and non-transparency in producer roles related to these monetization methods, there is typically no validly identifiable separation in user-generated content between interest-invested and interestfree content. Kidbait –children’s attention exploitation As commercial content targeting children (e.g., Schor, 2004), exposure to targeted advertising and embedded marketing on social media has been identified as potentially JOURNAL OF CHILDREN AND MEDIA 5 harmful to young people (Livingstone, 2013; Livingstone, Mascheroni, & Staksrud, 2018). It is a practice that is accelerating due to the uncontrolled dynamics of user-generated content. Discussions around family-oriented videos, child-friendly content, and child safety on YouTube have been extensive, especially after Elsagate –a controversy related to the discovery of content inappropriate for children camouflaged as Disney characters. Elsagate, named after a character from Disney’s animated film Frozen, appeared on the Toy Freaks channel (2012–2017) and depicted members of the family that ran the channel (the father and his children) in disturbing situations. Since then, Google has adopted stricter guidelines regarding children’s content on its platform and developed an app for parents to monitor their children’s content consumption, YouTube Kids, which released in 2015 (for an analysis, see Burroughs, 2017). Discussions have centered around explicitly inappropriate content, such as violence, abuse, and sexual content, whereas the appropriateness of other, perhaps softer and more nuanced content qualities have remained beyond the scope of these public discussions, including the roles of mediated societal values, educational affordances of the content, and the line between communication and marketing. User-generated content plays an ever-increasing role in children’s online video use. Nine out of 10 of the most subscribed-to child-oriented YouTube channels worldwide in January 2019 were user-generated (Statista, 2019). A mother and blogger illustratively described the typical way these channels are discovered and their appeal –the parental need for child-free time in order to take care of everyday tasks, as well as children’s recognition of and attraction to popular brands of media culture: My son was obsessed with Paw Patrol. So, when I needed to take a shower or cook a meal, I’d go to YouTube on the iPad and find Paw Patrol-related videos for him to watch. He fell in love with the Kinder Surprise Egg videos, where some chick with long fingernails and a squeaky, condescending voice opens plastic eggs (sometimes covered in Play-Doh, which is gross and makes little sense to me), and reveals a Paw Patrol toy, a Peppa Pig winder, or something similar (Wisner, 2016, n.pag.; italics in original). The mother concluded by calling the toy videos “toddler crack”and “plastic bullshit”: “These videos are basically like creepy commercials for toys, except for some godforsaken reason, they are much more interesting and addictive to kids than actual commercials”(ibid.). Indeed, according to adult quality standards, the repetitive, attention-grabbing content does not seem to strive for quality. While content, the main purpose of which is to attract attention and make a viewer click on a hyperlink, is called “clickbait,”the attention-seeking video material that aims at exploiting young viewers’media consumption patterns can be called “kidbait”. However, as “clickbait”, the term “kidbait”is slightly value-laden, referring to the speaker’s assessment of the content rather than to actual conditions, and it is sometimes questionable what is exploitation and what is not. Toy (review) videos are not the only type of videos in the exploitation genre but they are powerful among their child audiences. Kidbait videos are a result of the algorithmic recommendation system employed by platforms like YouTube (Airoldi, Beraldo, & Gandini, 2016). The more attention –views and subscribers –a video receives, the more likely the video will be recommended to viewers. For a toddler audience, the recommendations that are displayed as still thumbnail images in the side menu play the most 6M. JAAKKOLA significant role in the selection of video content. Thumbnails typically make use of strong colors, as well as identifiable merchandise and persons. Infants and toddlers, the majority of which is illiterate, cannot change their search strategies by entering new words into the search field but navigate only by selecting these algorithm-based recommendations shown on the screen. As long as toy videos are frequently watched content, it is probable that children end up watching the most popular videos if the video watching process is not intervened by an adult. VanDeGraph (2016) discovered that toy videos on YouTube have a different viewing pattern than other videos. Usually, people watch shorter videos for longer than they do long videos; the total time watched is usually about half the video length. However, VanDeGraph found that toy videos were watched for the same amount of time on average, no matter how long the video was. For example, some of the videos are probably watched on autoplay and, as noted by VanDeGraph (2016), toy videos are also “English optional,”meaning that children are not hindered by language barriers in their bingewatching. These factors may partly contribute to the high viewing numbers that toy videos tend to attain. Data and method The collection of data was executed, with channels as a unit of analysis, by means of an automated script, that is a program written by a computer programmer to perform data retrieval according to a set of ordered operations. The script retrieved an initial sample from the 5,000 most subscribed-to channels that automatically noted video counts, views, likes, and dislikes. The script was released as open software on GitHub. 1 Data retrieval occurred from April 26–29, 2017 and collected 4,999 channels representing 6,697,639 videos, with an average of 1,340 videos per channel. The toy review sample was pulled from this larger dataset (for an analysis on the dataset, see Jaakkola, 2018) by manual coding (see below), to arrive at a limited sample consisting of 35 toy review channels including 29,037 individual videos. The manual coding was applied in a two-stage process. First, review channels were separated from non-review channels with the help of “About”descriptions and examinations of the channel’s front page. This procedure limited the sample to 200 review channels. Second, remaining channels were coded according to the group of cultural objects the channel was mainly covering, such as toys, cosmetics, or games. A sample of 35 toy review channels was extracted. (For a more detailed methodological description of the sampling and data management process, see Jaakkola, 2018.) Thereafter, the sample of 35 toy review channels was subjected to a two-stage qualitative analysis. First, each channel was analyzed in terms of its profile and channel characteristics, such as subscribers, views, likes, and dislikes, to get an overview of these types of channels in general. Channels provided only a very rough overview and many of the individual videos on the review channels fell beyond the category of reviews. This is why the unit of analysis was switched from channels to videos. Second, using videos as the unit of analysis, five videos from each channel were selected that best fit the definition of a review and that were listed as a “review”by the content producers themselves. This second stage of analysis was conducted, preferably, using in-built playlists that were specifically created for toy reviews by the content creators to contribute their accessibility. JOURNAL OF CHILDREN AND MEDIA 7 A subset of 180 toy review videos from the 35 content producing channels were subjected to close-reading and analyzed with regard to the actors appearing in the videos (narrator) and the activities completed while conducting the review (method). In addition, the rhetorical strategies used by narrators when making an evaluation or an assessment were identified. Analysis Discovery of the child audience Central dimensions of the toy review channels under study are presented in Table 1. The channels had a relatively high number of subscriptions and a very high number of views on average. “Entertainment”was the most common self-designated category of the channels under review (N = 25, 71%). The average age of the channels at the point of the analysis was five years, with an average launch-date in 2013. Not surprisingly, the most viewed and subscribed-to channels were based in the United States (N = 22, 63%) and/or conducted in English (N = 30, 86%). Many of the channels evolved from that of a toy collector into a toy review video channel, especially those focusing on Disney merchandise. Toy collectors are typically aficionados who collect artifacts of certain type as a hobby, and a great deal of merchandise are meant to be collectibles. A number of content creators embarked on producing videos by showing diecasts from Disney Pixar’s box office hit, Cars. Initially, they had an “adult”interest in collecting merchandise. For example, in 2010 Blu Toys Club Surprise presented a collection of 718 DVDs in an adult voice-over video, including film categories that were not specifically directed at a child audience. Later on, as audience interest grew, more family members were included in the production of the channel and the scope of content evolved from a focus on adult interests to something that is more directed at children. Vloggers, too, often have similar beginnings. Ryan ToysReview’sfirst video, which was posted on 16 March 2015, was titled “Kid plays with toys Lego Duplo Number Train.”The video featured three-year-old Ryan picking up a package in a store, opening it at home, and building a “choo choo train.”As is typical in many of the review videos, Ryan’s mother asked him questions about the colors and numbers, serving as the dramaturge. Now that Ryan is seven years old, the videos have developed to include a more carefully designed set-up with an awareness of continuity, more sponsorship, and the early grey-toned thumbnails have become more colorful and carefully designed, reflecting a more general trend in toy videos. The discovery of the child audience, the common denominator in all of these videos, prompted many of the channels to change names or launch affiliate channels featuring Table 1. Averages of the review channels under study (N = 35). Total on average Per video on average Subscribers 2,409,410 4515 Views 2,419,066,089 3,606,394 Likes 3,391,412 5472 Dislikes 650,415 1279 8M. JAAKKOLA contexts so that they can be better dissected and analyzed in situated communication. Understandings of how vernacularized commercialism works may thus support families in resisting consumerism and transferring discouraged reactions into something more transformative. Conclusion This article has described the popular category of toy reviews on YouTube with the goal of finding out what vernacular the popular genre employs in its content and communication strategies. As “branded produsage”or “branded prosumption,”toy review videos are an extreme type of vernacular reviewing. A qualitative analysis showed that toy review channels use “reviewing”as a strategy to expose toys and other playful consumer products to their audiences, often embedded in other online strategies of play and entertainment. Even if motivated by educational, narrative, or dramaturgical factors, such intent is strongly intermingled with marketing and influencing, reinforcing popular brands. The lay, professional, or (semi-)professional content producers more or less consciously become promotional intermediaries who are only voluntarily bound by any ethical rules of conduct concerning their sponsorship and production principles. The findings of this study prompt adults’educational interventions. Guardians and other adult gatekeepers of child viewers, however, need support and tools for developing literacy for online genres. Toy reviewing also involves a great deal of potential for addressing toys, play, and children’s worlds in a way that supports children’s voices and agency. Enhancing support for child agency across all three categories of media literacy (content reception, produsage/prosumption, and production) is a 21st-century objective for media and information literacy actors. Note 1. The script YouTubeStats was written by Pasi Luostarinen (BeTeK) and released at https:// github.com/BeTeK/YoutubeStats. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Notes on contributor Maarit Jaakkola, PhD, Associate Professor, is working as a Researcher and the Assistant Director at Nordicom at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and as a Lecturer in Journalism at Tampere University, Finland. Jaakkola’s research interests are found at the intersection of theories of media, culture and learning. Currently, she is studying different forms of vernacular reviewing on popular platforms with an attempt to conceptualize the non-institutionalized forms of reviews produced by ordinary people. JOURNAL OF CHILDREN AND MEDIA 15 ORCID Maarit Jaakkola http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9979-6157 References Abidin, C. (2017). #Familygoals: Family influencers, calibrated amateurism, and justifying young digital labour. Social Media + Society,3(2), 1–15. Airoldi, M., Beraldo, D., & Gandini, A. (2016). Follow the algorithm: An exploratory investigation of music on YouTube. Poetics,57,1–13. Blank, G. (2007). Critics, ratings, and society: The sociology of reviews. 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