Supervised YouTube for older kids and teens coming soon

The YouTube Kids app is geared for young children, but there’s long been demand from parents for a supervised experience dedicated at tweens and teens. What’s essentially YouTube for older kids has just been announced and will be coming soon.

[W]e’ve heard from parents and older children that tweens and teens have different needs, which weren’t being fully met by our products. As children grow up, they have insatiable curiosity and need to gain independence and find new ways to learn, create, and belong.

A new supervised YouTube experience will offer three different content settings with varying feature restrictions. In-app purchases, commenting, and posting, as well as ads — including personalized ones — in certain categories, will be disabled at launch. That might change over time as feature and parental controls evolves.

• 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.

User input, machine learning and human review is used to determine what videos appear. Parents can also manage watch and search history from within their child’s account settings, while content blocking is coming in the future.

Supervised YouTube for older kids and teens is launching in beta over the coming months. Overall, it’s aimed at “parents who think their children are ready to explore the vast universe of YouTube videos.” The Google-owned company today reaffirmed its commitment to the standalone YouTube Kids experience and still recommends that for younger children.

We’ll start with an early beta for families with kids under the age of consent to test and provide feedback, as we continue to expand and improve the experience.

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