<!– A conversation with Greg Dray of Animaj – by Jo Redfern –>
Kids content is YouTube’s second biggest category, yet it earns less than 2% of the platform’s ad revenue. That gap is hurting the business, it is a structural failure and is pushing premium children’s media towards collapse.
Greg Dray has experienced that tension more than most. As co-founder of Animaj, the Paris and London-based next-generation kids media company, he has spent the past three years building a digital-first franchise model that spans YouTube, TikTok, Spotify and Roblox. Animaj channels have accumulated 85 billion views and 150 million followers. The company raised $85 million in 2025 and is profitable. In early 2026, Google’s AI Futures Fund invested in the business and Disney took them into its 2025 Accelerator.
But none of that fixes the underlying problem the industry faces.
« If we continue like this, we won’t have money to invest into content creation, » Greg told me. « As a community and as an industry, we’re doomed. »
He is not being dramatic. Kids content accounts for around 15% of all YouTube viewership, comparable to music but it only generates around 2% of YouTube’s $40 billion in annual ad revenue. That is not a gap that closes on its own. That gap between consumption and monetisation is pushing premium creators and producers out of the industry and leaving the world’s youngest audiences at risk of being surrounded by sub-par content with no incentive nor business model to fund anything better.
Reaching profitability at Animaj doesn’t represent a fix to the industry issue. In our conversation, Greg was blunt about the scale of the crisis. Less than 20% of kids content views on YouTube are currently monetised, compared to higher rates in other categories. The word « kids » has almost become a toxic label in the creator economy, synonymous with a broken business model, I too have heard it said in other quarters. Being associated with making kids content means the odds are stacked against you in terms of making money. Anecdotally, creators are avoiding tagging content as « Made for Kids » to preserve their ability to earn. Investment is drying up. Premium storytelling is on the verge of disappearing.
The reality is that the funding structures that built the modern kids media economy are no longer able to sustain it. So, what replaces them? Animaj is actively looking at how.
The root cause is both regulatory and technical. COPPA compliance requires contextual-only advertising against kids content, meaning no user data can be used for targeting. YouTube’s auction model depends on data-driven targeting to generate high CPMs. Without that capability, the platform’s pricing mechanism undervalues kids inventory by default – and when the rest of media is increasingly ad driven, data and the ability to value audiences at scale is what the media system functions on.
YouTube’s response has been muted according to Greg, and I see why. When their hands are tied by law and the rest of their platform is making billions in revenue there is little incentive to fix things. I’m not saying it’s right, but I can see why it is the case. As a result, the platform has no kids advertising sales team and although the total global kids advertising market is worth around $4 billion – split roughly evenly between the US and international markets – when compared to YouTube’s $40 billion annual ad revenue, the figure isn’t a sufficient motivator to platform leadership.
Greg described YouTube’s position on the health of the kids content business in blunt terms: « It’s not our problem to resolve. »
Indeed, as advertising and media analyst Ian Whittaker has said, if YouTube persuades TV companies and advertisers that YouTube is the future then the former start to panic and seek to compromise, and YouTube gets to secure their new definition as TV. And advertisers follow, they are switching budgets to the platform. Ian contends that the scariest part is not the speed of change, but how reluctant the industry still is to look it in the eye.
Meanwhile, YouTube continues to benefit from a steady supply of premium children’s content uploaded to its platform for free. The BBC has entered a partnership with YouTube, but in the UK has no commercial expectations from its content presence due to its public service funding. Other traditional media and premium content owners are also adding to the platform, to reach social-first audiences and add to their coffers, but in turn they are aiding the platform’s growth and retention and, in a sense, making the “YouTube is TV” argument self-fulfilling.
ANIMAJ AND HASBRO’S LUMEE
Animaj’s solve for the kids monetisation problem is Lumee, a joint venture with Hasbro that aggregates combined annual YouTube views across a portfolio spanning preschool (Peppa Pig, PJ Masks, Pocoyo, Maya the Bee) through to the harder-to-reach 6-12 demographic (Power Rangers, Transformers, Dungeons and Dragons, Rabbids) and family co-viewing content.
The model breaks with YouTube’s standard approach. Lumee sells ‘reservation media’ only, with no auction-based buying. Advertisers get video-by-video transparency, meaning they know exactly where their ads will run. Contextual targeting allows brands to place ads against specific content types, Nike against sports episodes for example, and the environment provides brand safety guarantees.
But Greg is clear that Lumee alone cannot solve the problem. The ambition is bigger than one company’s commercial success. Partnerships, collaboration, innovation and openness will all be key to kids media’s survival.
Another key to survival is better measurement. There is currently no standardised way to prove co-viewing, despite it being the primary consumption pattern for kids content. A parent watching Peppa Pig with a three-year-old represents a household with purchasing power, but no measurement system captures that value for advertisers. The under-13 audience remains a black box for media buyers. Without measurement, advertisers cannot compare kids content performance against other categories, and without that comparison, budget allocation will continue to flow elsewhere.
« I’m not fighting for the success of my organisation, » Greg said. « I’m fighting for the survival of kids media. » As a result, he wants to build a coalition across Moonbug, Pocket.watch and other major players to create collective pressure for change.
INSIDE THE AI STUDIO
Google’s investment in Animaj through its AI Futures Fund signals that the YouTube’s parent company does see value in AI-accelerated kids content production. Although Greg was keen to point out that doesn’t mean slop. Not from them.
We discussed what the investment means and what’s happening on the studio floor with regards to AI. He describes Google’s engineers coming into the creative process not to dictate, but to listen, to understand what it means to create original, high-quality content and how technology can support that endeavour. “One of our missions is to try to create a symbiotic relationship between the engineer and the artist”, he said. The tools being built and applied to storyboarding, in-betweening and the production pipeline are designed to eliminate administrative and repetitive tasks, not creative ones. He was keen to point out that the front-end creative work remains entirely human-led. The goal is not to replace the spark of creation, but to ensure that artists spend their time on art, not on processes that machines can handle faster.
But with all that, it doesn’t fully solve the kids problem. If a platform doesn’t allow for effective monetisation of kids content, does cheaper production really help? Only partially. For companies like Animaj lower costs do improve margin, but they do not move the CPM. They do not change YouTube’s auction model, nor the regulations that are designed to protect kids, but which also strangle business models. They do not persuade advertisers that the under-13 audience is worth paying to reach. In a market where the core problem is revenue, AI efficiency is not a magic bullet.
So, the argument is not that AI solves the monetisation gap directly but that it buys time and optionality. If you can maintain content quality at a reduced cost, you stay in the game long enough for the commercial infrastructure, coalition-building and measurement standards, to catch up – and it means you don’t go bust waiting for the industry to fix itself. AI-accelerated production works as a survival strategy but only if we fix the revenue side of things. If it does not, cheaper content is still unprofitable content. The clock runs slower, but it still runs.
AND THE CLOCK IS TICKING
The ambition Greg has set is to narrow the gap between kids content’s share of YouTube viewership (15%) and its share of ad revenue (under 2%). Even reaching 10% of ad revenue would represent a transformation for the kids media business.
But the timeline is compressed. Regulatory solutions move slowly and the industry cannot wait seven years for legislative fixes to work through the system. The alternative, if premium content continues to decline, is a kids media ecosystem defined by the cheapest content that algorithms will promote.
Whether Animaj addresses the monetisation crisis or simply accelerates the volume of content on a still-broken model is the question the issue the industry needs to get moving on. What Animaj is betting is that enough people inside the system now care enough to fix it. Kids media cannot afford for that bet to be wrong. The stakes are high, so I hope they succeed.
