Over the past decade, the children’s media landscape has undergone a fundamental transformation. Where once young audiences gathered around television sets for appointment viewing of dedicated children’s programming blocks, today’s children consume content across a diverse, fragmented, and constantly shifting range of platforms, devices, and formats. YouTube creators are watched on television screens, animated series are streamed on phones, and gaming content is consumed interactively on tablets. What was once a relatively linear ecosystem has evolved into a fragmented, multi-platform digital marketplace, where video, games, social media, and interactive formats overlap and compete for attention.
While these shifts have opened new commercial opportunities and dramatically lowered barriers to entry for producers, they have also made children’s media measurement significantly more complex. In short, children’s media consumption has shifted decisively into fragmented, platform- driven digital environments — but the measurement infrastructure has not kept pace. The result is a growing gap between where children spend time and where the industry has visibility. This measurement gap is now constraining investment, distorting incentives, and weakening the long-term sustainability of the children’s media ecosystem. It represents a structural market misalignment with material economic consequences.
This paper explores the scope of measurement challenges in the children’s media market, investigates causes for measurement gaps, and proposes a set of potential steps the industry can take to improve the state of children’s media measurement. In particular, the paper recommends the creation of an industry Committee that unites stakeholders across media, advertising, platforms, and measurement to develop integrated measurement frameworks that combine panels, big data, and platform insights; create kids’ media metrics reflecting co-viewing, repeat viewing, and developmental factors; and explore synthetic datasets and AI-assisted modeling to address measurement gaps while preserving privacy. The Committee represents a coordinated industry response to improve children’s media measurement while preserving critical privacy protections, including the development of privacy-compliant cross-platform measurement frameworks, stronger collaboration between platforms, publishers, advertisers, agencies, and measurement providers, and exploration of new approaches such as common integrated measurement solutions, program-level data sharing, bespoke kids’ media measurement frameworks, and AI-driven synthetic datasets designed to address gaps in audience visibility while protecting children’s privacy.
