Amazon is 'kids favourite online retailer'

Amazon is children's favourite online retailer, statistics from kids marketing platform SuperAwesome have revealed, with 54% of girls and 47% of boys aged between 7 and 9 years old favouring the online giant.

Runners up included eBay (7%), Argos (6%), FIFA Store (4%) and Game (3%), Tiffany Tasker, business development manager at SuperAwesome told The Bookseller's Children's Conference yesterday (27th September).

"Amazon is the best example of a company offering kids everything," Tasker said.  "From content just for them to special kids tablets. With Amazon's special kids Kindles, parents can choose what books their children have access to. At this point kids are even using Amazon as a search engine for finding cool stuff, read toy reviews and things like that. It is consistently the favourite online shop for kids of all ages."

She added: "Even though this is a pre-purchasing age, kids are still developing brand affinity with a store. That's really important."

In the broader children's digital market outside of retail, Netflix spent $5bn on content in 2015 and is "doubling down" on kids and families, putting its efforts into offering exclusive content for children, Tasker said. Households with young kids are significantly more likely to subscribe to a streaming service like Netflix, with 50% of its 75m subscribers watching kids shows on the service. "The pester power is real," Tasker warned, adding: "Kids begin to develop pride and trust and recognition from a young age."

YouTube was meanwhile presented as a huge opportunity for publishers, with statistics offered by tech journalist Stuart Dredge, co-founder of Apps Playground, revealing that kids channels occupy 35 of the top 100 YouTube channels.

Among the "fastest growing" channels was the wrestling channel WE, while Disney and Lego between them scored 460m views in July alone. Other significant "big hitters" in the children's market globally on YouTube are Ryan's Toy Review, which accrued 580m views in July, Little Baby Bum, a channel featuring animated nursey rhymes, garnering 9.2bn views overall, and Web and Tiarras, a channel featuring slapstick videos without dialogue, which was the fifth biggest channel across the entirety of YouTube in July, with 515m views. Other notable channels included The Diamond Minecart and El Reino Infantil.

Dredge said: "There's a huge long tail out there. There are channels getting a hundred thousand subscribers and tens of millions of views. That just is interesting in terms of potential partnerships with books."

Other findings showed younger children don't identify that they are multi-screening, according to Tasker, despite often using smartphones and tablets while watching television. They are also becoming increasingly "device agnostic," she said. 

"They don't mind how they're accessing the content, so long as they have access to it," Tasker added.

Pokemon Go was used as one example of a platform of "device agnosticism", as it took the brand away from its original roots on Nintendo and Wii Consoles and moved it beyond those devices for the first time to great success. It also shows, according to Tasker, that: "It's not just traditional companies that get disrupted by kids and by start-ups."