YouTube announces Supervised Experiences offering parents more options for kids

As a parent, YouTube Kids is great but as the kids grow so do their interests. To cater for the changing needs and interests of children as they progress to ‘tweens and teens’, YouTube has today announced new ways for parents to control what their kids are seeing on the platform.

YouTube is introducing three new ‘Supervised Experiences’ for parents to choose from, which bridge the gap between the fully monitored YouTube Kids experience and the independent full YouTube experience. 

Google has listed the three levels which will be introduced

• Explore: For children ready to move on from YouTube Kids and explore content on YouTube, this setting will feature a broad range of videos generally suitable for viewers ages 9+, including vlogs, tutorials, gaming videos, music clips, news, educational content and more.
• Explore More: With content generally suitable for viewers ages 13+, this setting will include an even larger set of videos, and also live streams in the same categories as “Explore.”
• Most of YouTube: This setting will contain almost all videos on YouTube, except for age-restricted content, and it includes sensitive topics that may only be appropriate for older teens.

The new experiences will use a combination of ‘user input, machine learning and human review’ to determine what’s appropriate for each bracket.

Google will also continue to add features for parents including options to ‘select specific videos and channels from the main YouTube platform’ to add to their childs YouTube Kids viewing list, as well as the option to block content.

The new experiences will launch ‘in the coming months’ as a beta, offering a small base of users access to the new levels so Google can test the service.