Exasperated dad Simon Hooper shakes his fist at the camera in a viral video. The precise “brain rot” he’s referring to is the arrival of a polarising show that’s lighting up parent chats around the globe. And while Salish and Jordan Matter might be new to Netflix Kids users, the father-daughter content creators are familiar to anyone who’s spent any time on the internet.
Jordan Matter, who started his YouTube career in 2017 as a photography vlogger, pivoted to family content after his energetic preteen daughter, Salish – a competitive gymnast – brought viral traction to the channel in 2019 and 2020. (Famously, his YouTube bio reads, “My daughter has taken over my channel!”) After amassing more than 42 million YouTube subscribers, the duo signed a landmark deal with Netflix in February, constituting remixed content from the Matters’ YouTube archives. Soon an exclusive, original series starring the now 16-year-old Salish and her dad will be out as part of a broad trend of Netflix poaching YouTube creators to attract younger audiences. (YouTube is trying to stem the flow with exclusivity contracts.) Think gamified family life challenges such as “I Went On a Fake Date To Prank My Dad” and “I Can’t Sleep Until I Find a Rare Glitter Dumpling” in the style popularised by the world’s most famous YouTuber, Mr Beast. It’s the kind of frantic, shouty, hyper-stimulating unscripted kids’ content shaped in part by an obsessive, second-by-second eye on YouTube Studio’s audience retention graphs.
There are a lot of pop-up graphics and fast cuts – a style known as retention editing that has developed specifically around YouTube’s algorithm. Like Mr Beast, Jordan Matter optimises for views with aggressively A/B/C-tested, aggressively colour-saturated thumbnails. You own the house, the TV etc.
Enough said.” Michelle Yates has a long-running “no YouTube” policy in her home but a few months ago she started to notice Netflix Kids was “suddenly more shouty, more gamified and more focused on dares”. Her eight-year-old son had discovered Salish and Jordan Matter. About the same time, she says, people on her parents’ group chat started exchanging tips on how to block YouTube creators on Netflix.
Plus, she started noticing promotion for YouTuber Mark Rober’s Roblox game on his Netflix CrunchLabs show, on top of the usual promo for his educational CrunchLab science boxes. I’m thinking of cancelling the subscription because I don’t want to have to monitor every show … it’s exhausting.” It started with Cocomelon – the mesmerising smooth-brain channel for toddlers – which moved over to Netflix in 2020. In a concerted push Netflix have now scooped up favourites including Ms Rachel, Blippi, Danny Go!, the Stokes Twins and now the Stem educator Mark Rober of CrunchLabs.
This is entertainment of varying style, educational ambition and target age group but, crucially for Netflix, these creators have all brought prebuilt audiences and pre-honed retention knowhow to the streaming service. (Cocomelon’s parent company has notoriously tested retention of focus-group children with a sinister Distractatron.) The content boon for Netflix is part of a larger pattern of changing content presentation and consumption for kids that’s also reflected on Amazon Prime and Disney+. Digital whack-a-mole has become the ultimate gamified family life challenge. But unlike the Matter family, it doesn’t take place inside theme parks or between the candy-coloured aisles of Sephora.
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