At YouTube, we believe that children can learn, discover new interests and foster a sense of belonging when they explore the world through online video. We're working to help creators understand how to make enriching, engaging and inspiring videos for children and families.
As part of these ongoing efforts, we've developed a set of quality principles below to help guide YouTube's children's and family content creators. These principles were developed with child development specialists and are based on extensive research.
The list below is meant to give you a better idea of what may be considered low- or high-quality content and is not exhaustive. These principles supplement our Community Guidelines, which help create a safe viewing experience for everyone and apply to both long-form content and YouTube Shorts.
You're responsible for following our Community Guidelines on all content that you create. We'll continue to re-evaluate and update the principles on this page.
High-quality content principles
High-quality content should be age-appropriate, enriching, engaging and inspiring. This content can come in different formats and cover a range of topics, but it should promote:
- Looking after yourself and others: This content promotes positive behaviour, respect and healthy habits. Examples include demonstrating kindness, good friendship and self-care routines like brushing your teeth and eating nutritious foods.
- Learning and inspiring curiosity: This content gets children excited to explore, learn and think critically in fun and age-appropriate ways. Learning includes school subjects and beyond (e.g. all kinds of hobbies, tutorials, fun facts and more). Thinking critically means helping children to ask questions when learning about a topic and not just believing everything that they hear or read.
- Creativity, play and a sense of imagination: This content celebrates childrens' imaginations and is designed to make children think and engage with things in new, creative ways. Content might show creating an imaginary world, inventing and telling their own stories, mastering football skills, joining a sing-along, building an original game or getting hands-on with arts and crafts.
- Life skills and experiences: This content includes life experiences (like the first day at school or going to the dentist) and positive role models. It helps children to build life skills like problem-solving and understanding their feelings. It often includes a complete narrative (like character development, plot and resolution) and a clear takeaway or lesson.
- Shows them the world: This content shows a wide range of experiences, people and places in the world that helps children find stories relatable to their own lives. A video might include characters with a range of ages, interests or backgrounds.
Low-quality content principles
Avoid making low-quality content. Low-quality content is:
- Heavily promotional: Content that mainly features products, brands and logos (such as toys or food) or encourages excessive buying like unboxing videos.
- Encouraging negative behaviours or attitudes: Content that encourages dangerous activities, wastefulness, bullying, dishonesty or a lack of respect for others. For example, this content could include dangerous/unsafe pranks or unhealthy eating habits.
- Deceptively educational: This refers to content that uses titles or thumbnails to trick children into thinking it's educational, when it's really not. It might promise to teach something, like colours or numbers, but show incorrect or unhelpful information.
- Hard to follow: Videos that are confusing or make no sense, often due to jumbled storylines, unclear audio or lack of a clear storyline (beginning, middle and end). This type of video is often the result of mass production or auto-generation.
- Sensational or misleading: Content that is untrue, exaggerated or bizarre and that may confuse a young audience. It might also include 'keyword stuffing' or the practice of using popular keywords of interest to children in a repetitive, altered or exaggerated way. The keywords may also be used in a way that does not make sense.
- Strange use of children's characters: This content takes characters that children know and love (animated or live action) and puts them in inappropriate or potentially risky situations.
Effect on channel performance
The quality principles for children's and family content may affect your channel's performance. High-quality 'Made for Kids' content gets raised up in recommendations. They also guide decisions both for inclusion in YouTube Kids and channel and video monetisation. If a channel is found to have a strong focus on low-quality 'Made for Kids' content, it may be suspended from the YouTube Partner Programme. If an individual video is found to violate these quality principles, it may get limited or no ads.
We look to each of you to help create enriching and inspiring content for children and families on YouTube.