Dive Brief:

• On Monday, YouTube officially rolled out YouTube Kids—a new platform meant to help children enjoy kid-friendly videos, ads and all. 
• The app, available on the App Store and Google Play, allows parents to set time limits for watching videos and helps children avoid the more adult content typically found on YouTube. 
• Ads will be present on the YouTube Kids app, but should still remain kid-friendly in nature. 

Dive Insight:

Marketing to children is typically a delicate issue, but the fact remains that YouTube is incredibly pervasive—and until now there wasn't a good way to sort through content to ensure it was kid-friendly. In that respect, YouTube Kids will surely be a hit among parents who want to allow kids to watch videos but want a bit more control. The ads could end up being a controversial point for the app, despite the fact that advertising to children exists in a lot of other mediums. Regardless, marketers looking to target children (and their parents) now have an incredibly lucrative digital video channel.