A document analysis on kid Youtubers and the videos they share

In todays world, technology develops rapidly and social media becomes a part of life. YouTube is one of the most popular social networks. The fact that money can be made on YouTube has brought the concepts of YouTuber first, and then kid YouTuber to the agenda. Starting very early ages, children now spend hours by just watching videos of kid YouTubers. This qualitative research aimed to investigate the content of videos in kid YouTuber channels. Document Analysis method was adopted in this qualitative research. 15 kid YouTube channels were selected among the popular (the most viewed) ones, and 100 videos from these channels with a high number of views were analyzed with emerging codes, and the types of content on kid YouTuber channels and the messages they provide were outlined. Then, 15 videos from different channels and on different topics were determined and micro-analysis of these videos was performed using the Multimodal Interaction Analysis method. Based on these analysis, the following six categories in the content of the videos were determined: Videos containing negative behaviors, videos containing advertisement / promotion, videos against privacy of private life, videos with scary content, videos encouraged for consumption, and videos with a positive social message. As a result of the analysis, it was concluded that children should not be left alone with the current form of media contents on YouTube unconsciously. To offer children more appropriate media contents, some suggestions to families, teachers, media producers and government officials were made at the end of the paper.