Response to YouTube Made for Kids COPPA Change

Nov 14

Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act otherwise known as COPPA is a instrument used by the American Government to help protect children from predatory targeted advertising. This was created back in the early days of the internet, and unfortunately has not been updated since.

The issue that we have with the COPPA Measure is that it does not just take away certain advertising types that reduce the income for other vloggers, but when it comes to our channel it can restrict our growth. Assume that a person wants to search for a video about Grinchmas which is a popular event at Universal Studios, if we mark the video as made for kids or the system’s algorithm detects it is due to the music which appeals to the children or the characters involved, then the result will be that it can’t be searched for. Additionally, if it is made for kids the video also will lose certain other privileges such as comments, likes and dislikes. Originally the idea was make all videos made for kids to protect yourself as a creator from the fines of around $43,000 per occurrence however this is not effective because without your videos being able to be searched for it makes it next to impossible to get new viewership unless you promote the channel in other methods.

Hello Kitty from Japan Pavilion at Epcot

Now for channels that are family friendly and visit Disney World a lot, this can be difficult as the Walt Disney World and Disney Land for that matter contain music and other immersive elements that can attract individuals of all ages and not specifically targeted towards the children. However, what if that FCC member is having a bad day and comes across my video of the Small World attraction and declares that appeals to children too much. That is the center of the entire issue, and what makes the future of online content creation in general at stake.

For the record and this is important, we never got into youtube to make money, our goal back when small channels could monetize was that, we could use the small ad revenue to pay for a extra nice meal at a park. Once the revenue was taken away, we decided it was best to keep going but during the entire time I was employed by Target or by Ford of Clermont.

Finally to conclude this, I will never stop making videos because I do it to give Lillian my special cute girl memories of family time and I want to leave a mark on this world that a dad was here with a Microcephalic child that loved her more than anything and wanted her from the start and would always keep fighting to give her more and it did not matter who got in my way.