Kids have the best ad recall on YouTube long-form videos

YouTube is still kids’ favorite choice for watching content, and the platform’s efforts to diversify its formats are paying off. Those are two findings from the latest Precise Advertiser Report: Kids, a semiannual survey of children’s consumption habits published by the London-based ad tech provider Precise TV.

We’ve covered Precise data in the past, and the firm’s latest findings are consistent with its previous reports. As per usual, YouTube reaches more two-to-12-year-olds than any other social video platform. 78% of the U.S.-based kids in Precise’s panel said that they use Google’s video hub.

That number is similar to the figure reported in the PARK data from a year ago, but YouTube Shorts is making deep inroads among Gen Alpha. The percentage of Shorts users in the PARK survey is up 14% year-over-year, reaching 53%. Over the same period, TikTok usage dropped from 44% to 41%, so kids’ aren’t necessarily watching more short-form videos overall — they’re simply directing more of their attention to YouTube’s TikTok competitor.

The rise of comedy videos, which are popular on YouTube Shorts, informs the format’s rising cachet among Gen Alpha. For both boys and girls in the 10-to-12 age range, comedy is the most popular video category. That wasn’t the case in the PARK data a year ago, and parents are getting in on the yuks, too. 42% of the parents 

who responded to Precise’s survey said they co-view comedy content with their kids.

That multigenerational viewing experience is having a strong effect on ad recall. The PARK respondents were most likely to recall ads that ran on the long-form version of YouTube, but all of YouTube’s recall numbers are up year-over-year. Long-form YouTube recall rose from 53% to 76%, while Shorts recall went from 21% to 54%. That means there are more than twice as many kids remembering Shorts ads than there were 12 months ago — and that is in turn changing parents’ behavior, with 47% of them claiming that they saw the last item they purchased for their kid in a YouTube ad.

The good news doesn’t end at YouTube. In general, Precise’s Gen Alpha respondents are remembering more ads than they did a year ago. In 2024, YouTube long-form video was the only ad source that at least 50% of kids could recall. Now there are seven different platforms at or above that benchmark, so the marketers who are reshaping the creator economy seem to be doing a bang-up job.