YouTube mogul looks past the channel that made him
Diversification becomes important, even for a giant like Cocomelon
Jay Jeon is an unassuming mogul. No-one takes notice of him as he slips into the corner booth at the Italian steakhouse steps from his Orange County office on a sunny Friday. Most toddlers who knew what the trim, soft-spoken 55-year-old does would have gone nuts.
Jeon runs Cocomelon, a YouTube channel dedicated to nursery rhymes and original songs, whose animated children and creatures generate about 2.5-billion views in a typical month. That translates into as much as $11.3m in monthly advertising revenue, according to estimates from industry analyst Social Blade.
In terms of viewership, an average Cocomelon video dwarfs the turnout for most of the world’s sports leagues, pop stars and scripted TV. It’s the second most watched YouTube channel, trailing only T-Series, India’s music king.
Cocomelon’s success has caught everyone off guard, including Jeon. For more than a decade, he and his wife ran their channel more or less by themselves, and he was happy that way. The steakhouse meeting is his first media interview, and one condition was that he not be photographed, for fear of paparazzi. Another: his wife was not to be named or discussed.
Even the couple’s neighbours don’t know which channel they run. “Nobody knows me,” Jeon says between bites of pasta. “I really like that.”
He owns 100% of Treasure Studio, which controls Cocomelon, and for years he and his wife have rejected investors, sponsors and demands to translate the cartoons into other languages, make sequels to big hits or roll out plush toys based on the characters.
Now, however, the Jeons and their team of about 20 employees are ready to merchandise. Their first forays beyond YouTube include albums of the channel’s popular songs and, later this year, Cocomelon toys, made by Jazwares, known for its Cabbage Patch Kids and Pokémon dolls.
Jeon says he’s also thinking about ways to develop a fulllength theatrical movie based on the show. (In a normal week, Cocomelon uploads one original video that’s a few minutes long, and a longer compilation of old footage.)
Diversification is becoming more important for YouTube stars, especially those with young audiences, because the formula that fuelled Cocomelon’s success is changing. YouTube still sells ads against videos, but in January it had to stop using child-focused clips to sell more profitable targeted ads, which are personalised to each viewer’s browsing history.
This change, with a $170m fine, was part of YouTube’s September deal with the US Federal Trade Commission to settle charges that it routinely built behavioural profiles on children younger than 13, flagrantly violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. (In another condition of the settlement, the company neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing.)
Since the change, the top children’ channels have lost 50%-60% of their ad sales, according to Chris Williams, who runs the children’s media company PocketWatch.
Jeon says his channel’s ad revenue has declined but wouldn’t say how much or whether he believes YouTube is a trustworthy conduit for children’s programming.
He praises the site for helping people tell stories that otherwise might go untold. Still, his company’s new ventures speak to a shift away from a YouTube-only business model, among even the channel’s most popular creators. Each new Cocomelon video now takes about two months to produce. The need and potential to expand into other arenas has become obvious, says Williams, who has helped at least one young star get a show on Nickelodeon and a line of merchandise sold in Walmarts.
“Look at the universe of YouTube channels, consumer products, premium series, live events,” he says. “I see a big opportunity.”
Jeon moved to Los Angeles from South Korea in the mid1990s and got into commercial directing after studying film at a local arts school. He and his wife, a children’s book author, began making short cartoons to accompany children’s songs about a decade later to entertain their two young sons.
When they showed some of the clips to friends from church, one of them suggested the couple post them on YouTube, then brand new. The Jeons posted their first video, under the account ABCKidTV, a month before Google acquired the website in 2006.
Even after their own children outgrew the videos, the couple kept making them as a creative outlet. For years, ABCKidTV posted classic singalongs such as The Alphabet Song and Wheels on the Bus.
Over the years, viewership steadily rose, and at some point — Jeon forgets exactly when — he started earning enough from YouTube ads to quit his day job and hire animators and songwriters.
Then, suddenly, everything changed. In the autumn of 2017, after the team had begun producing cartoons with 3Drendered characters, monthly views nearly doubled, to about 238-million, in a matter of two months, according to Tubular Labs, a market researcher.
In 2018, Jeon picked a new channel name, an amalgamation of coconut and watermelon. “It’s kid-friendly,” he says. “Sweet.”
By the end of that year, monthly views totalled about 2billion. Cocomelon’s most popular video, a Baby Shark riff called Bath Song (“Wash my hair, doo doo doo doo doo doo”), has been viewed more than 2.3billion times.
“It’s just a staggering number,” says Patrick Reese, an executive at Fullscreen, Jeon’s manager. Reese scours YouTube for copycat channels that blatantly upload Cocomelon’s videos as their own.
The audience for Cocomelon, which has blown far past those of the Disney Channel, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network and whichever episodes of
Sesame Street remain outside the HBO paywall, is a testament to that.
Jeon’s channel drew an appreciable percentage of the about $8bn YouTube handed out to video creators last year.
Cocomelon has become the most visible face of the YouTube cartoon industry, which includes a sea of anonymous animated content farms that have occasionally scandalised the video site over the past few years.
Critics say the channel’s success is less a function of its material than its savvy manipulation of YouTube’s recommendation system.
The channel’s rise to superstardom coincides with its use of the search tag “no no baby”, which in late 2017 was also associated with a steady stream of superviral videos, usually of a stubborn child learning to do household tasks. (“No no baby” had recently replaced “bad baby”, a search term that had been co-opted by a series of nightmarish clips of infants hurling food and screaming in terror.)
“These are all great keywords, but show me the educators behind it,” says Steven Wolfe Pereira, CEO of the small, children-focused Encantos Media.
Jeon says he’s a storyteller, not an expert in search engine optimisation.
“I never look up the reason something is popular or how I can please the YouTube algorithm,” he says. “I know what matters. Stories matter.”
With his anonymity mostly intact, he doesn’t have to worry much about moms and dads who’ve heard Bath Song for the thousandth time complaining to him on the street.
And if that air of mystery turns some people off, that’s OK. “I don’t want more viewership,” he says. “I’m fine.”
I NEVER LOOK UP THE REASON SOMETHING IS POPULAR OR HOW I CAN PLEASE THE YOUTUBE ALGORITHM. I KNOW WHAT MATTERS