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Credit: DisneyDisney is doomed to fail if it doesn’t do something to attract a new generation of child fans, and soon.
For nearly a century, The Walt Disney Company has reigned as the preeminent children’s entertainment provider, to the point where “Disney” is essentially synonymous with the idea of kid-friendly, sentimental content. While the company has had more adult-oriented brands like Touchstone and Caravan Pictures over the years to release different varieties of films, Disney has always relied on children as its primary audience and power base.
According to a new report in Business Insider, the Mouse House has been losing its child audience to other sources for years now and is facing an existential threat to its future business if it doesn’t figure out how to bring them back.
For example, the once-popular Disney Channel “plummeted from a top-10 network with nearly 2 million average daily primetime viewers in 2014 to No. 80 with a measly 132,000 in 2023.” That is a mind-boggling drop of nearly 95% of its audience in less than ten years, which would be a death knell for any company that did not have the cross-platform resources of Disney.
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Disney’s main competitor (in the sense that it relentlessly outperforms the Mouse) is YouTube, which commands a far greater market share of child audiences than any other service. Children ages 2 to 11 overwhelmingly prefer streaming platforms (per Nielsen) to linear/traditional TV, with two-thirds of television watching time being on various services. Of those, YouTube commands the biggest audience by far.
In April 2024 (the most recent data available), YouTube holds 23.3% of viewing audiences aged 2-11, dwarfing Disney+ with a percentage of 7.6%. Maverix Insights & Strategy, which analyzes child viewing behavior, co-founder Alexia Raven says, “YouTube is their primary platform of choice. It meets them where they are and meets their passions in nuanced ways. It really has shifted the entertainment landscape.”
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However, the issue with all of this is not just that more kids are watching more YouTube than Disney+ (of which 60% of subscribers were adults without kids at home). The issue is that Disney kids grow up to be Disney adults, who then indoctrinate their own children into caring about Snow White, Animal Kingdom, and all the other myriad, extremely profitable branches of the Mouse House.
If Disney does not figure out how it can get child audiences to become attached to it at a young age, they will not form the famed bond that prompts so many Guests to go into severe debt just for a visit to the Walt Disney World Resort or to turn a 15-year-later sequel into the biggest movie that Pixar has ever made.
It is not enough for Disney to just make sequels and jack up its prices at Disney Parks to appease shareholders right now, it has to think about how the children of today are the customers of tomorrow.
Do you think that children are turning away from Disney?