Manchester City has become the first football club to launch a dedicated channel on YouTube Kids. The platform will host a range of content, including behind-the-scenes videos and a weekly magazine show titled Xtra Time, in which presenters will discuss City’s week on and off the pitch. The channel will also feature match highlights and short-form content aimed at children under 12.
Nuria Tarre, Chief Marketing Officer for City Football Group believes it is cultivating its future fandoms. She underlined that the app is fully COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule) and GDPR compliant but to create an even safer environment for children it has put parental locks are on the app and ensured that there are no in-app purchases or competitions directly accessible through the program.
Nuria Tarre said: “Launching our dedicated football channel on YouTube Kids is an exciting step for us as we continue to explore new and innovative ways to connect with the next generation of City fans. We want to continue to push boundaries beyond our existing platforms to reach new audiences and as YouTube Kids is the number one video platform for children, it feels like the right place to share our content. We strongly believe in creating safe and certified environments for children online and YouTube Kids offers a trusted way for our content to be consumed by the younger generation. We are not launching this to capture data about kids. It is really about finding a way to engage with those kids,” she said “We innovated when we launched our membership product Junior Citizens, this is now the home of that membership.We have a duty to put safe tools into the hands of our kids. They spend a lot of time, their main research tool is YouTube – there is already a lot of football content there
Cedric Petitpas of YouTube Kids UK added: “We’re excited to see the launch of a kids-dedicated YouTube channel by Manchester City. We know that kids have an enormous appetite for sports-related content and football in particular. Our team craves this type of content that encourages kids to engage with sports, go out and play with their mates.”
This is a transformational initiative by. Manchester City club at a time when there is increasing scrutiny over how brands are engaging with kids online.The City Football Group is quickly becoming one of the world’s first truly global brands, but the key to its next phase of growth is securing a generation of fans who some worry are not as interested in football as previous generations.
