Parents with a ‘no YouTube’ policy have noticed Netflix Kids is ‘suddenly more shouty, more gamified and more focused on dares’. Composite: Getty Images/Guardian design View image in fullscreen Parents with a ‘no YouTube’ policy have noticed Netflix Kids is ‘suddenly more shouty, more gamified and more focused on dares’. Composite: Getty Images/Guardian design Children's TV Parents fear YouTubers are bringing ‘brain rot’ to Netflix. But are kids wising up to ‘slop’? As streamers poach viral creators to appeal to children, digital whack-a-mole has become a new kind of family challenge
Prefer the Guardian on Google E xasperated dad Simon Hooper shakes his fist at the camera in a viral video . “We managed to get rid of YouTube in our household six months ago and the kids are finally OK with it,” he says – but Netflix is “now commissioning YouTubers to make their brain rot and putting it back in front of my kids’ faces”.
The precise “brain rot” he’s referring to is the arrival of a polarising show that’s lighting up parent chats around the globe. And while Salish and Jordan Matter might be new to Netflix Kids users , the father-daughter content creators are familiar to anyone who’s spent any time on the internet.
Jordan Matter, who started his YouTube career in 2017 as a photography vlogger, pivoted to family content after his energetic preteen daughter, Salish – a competitive gymnast – brought viral traction to the channel in 2019 and 2020. (Famously, his YouTube bio reads, “My daughter has taken over my channel!”)
After amassing more than 42 million YouTube subscribers, the duo signed a landmark deal with Netflix in February, constituting remixed content from the Matters’ YouTube archives. Soon an exclusive, original series starring the now 16-year-old Salish and her dad will be out as part of a broad trend of Netflix poaching YouTube creators to attract younger audiences. (YouTube is trying to stem the flow with exclusivity contracts .)
Read more Think gamified family life challenges such as “ I Went On a Fake Date To Prank My Dad ” and “ I Can’t Sleep Until I Find a Rare Glitter Dumpling ” in the style popularised by the world’s most famous YouTuber, Mr Beast. It’s the kind of frantic, shouty, hyper-stimulating unscripted kids’ content shaped in part by an obsessive, second-by-second eye on YouTube Studio’s audience retention graphs. There are a lot of pop-up graphics and fast cuts – a style known as retention editing that has developed specifically around YouTube’s algorithm. Like Mr Beast, Jordan Matter optimises for views with aggressively A/B/C-tested , aggressively colour-saturated thumbnails.
“It’s our responsibility to ensure that we save our kids from this grey matter-destroying nonsense as they won’t do it themselves,” Hooper says. “The strength of the addiction is too strong.”
More than 3,900 comments underneath the post heartily agree, with a few exceptions. “This is super easy. You parent. That’s it. You own the house, the TV etc. Enough said.”
View image in fullscreen The banner on Jordan Matter’s YouTube page states: ‘Subscribe or my daughter will punch you’ ‘It’s exhausting’ Michelle Yates has a long-running “no YouTube” policy in her home but a few months ago she started to notice Netflix Kids was “suddenly more shouty, more gamified and more focused on dares”. Her eight-year-old son had discovered Salish and Jordan Matter. About the same time, she says, people on her parents’ group chat started exchanging t…