Why I love Bluey (and hate Cocomelon)

These are the two most-streamed children's shows. Joe Brumm's personal touch for Bluey trumps Cocomelon's engagement-hacking approach.

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Today, let’s look at the creative process behind two of the most popular kids streaming shows (Bluey, Cocomelon).

Also this week:

• Instagram’s $32B ad biz

• Solar Eclipse and Airbnb

• …and them fire memes (including a wild Netflix feature)

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I had a dry January.

I didn’t actually plan for it but my wife and I hosted some family friends for New Year’s Eve and someone brought Jello shooters.

Anyone who has had Jello shooters knows how those things can sneak up on you.

New Year’s Day was a next-level hangover but there was no sleeping it off. My son had a million things he wanted to do and, by mid-day, my body decided that it had to be a booze-free month.

I am sharing this because I recently started watching Bluey — the popular Australian children’s show about four animated dogs (the Heeler family). To my surprise, a storyline for an episode titled “Whale Watching” is literally about hungover parenting…on New Year’s Day.

From my son’s perspective, “Whale Watching” was hilarious because the title character (Bluey, 7 years old) and her sister (Bingo, 5 years old) jump on their dad (Bandit) and pretend he’s a whaling boat. Bandit is hungover and when his daughters ask if he’s “sick”, the mom — who is recovering on the couch — says that “dad is just sleepy”.

I enjoyed it because I have never seen any type of media that so perfectly captures such a niche parenting ordeal (one that I suspect many reading this email have experienced).

The show’s creator — Joe Brumm (now 46-years old) — has created a streaming juggernaut by making content for pre-school age children that is appealing for both parents and kids. Here are some impressive Bluey stats, per Bloomberg Businessweek:

• The brand is valued at $2B

• It was the 2nd most-viewed streaming program in 2023 with 44 billion viewing minutes (Suits was #1 at 58 billion viewing minutes)

• It accounted for 29% of Disney+ TV views in Q4 of 2023

Bluey’s run pushed it ahead of another popular kid’s streaming brand: Cocomelon, a show built around fast-cutting animation, nursery rhymes and bleeding ears for parents who have to listen to “Wheels on the Bus” on loop for six straight hours (Cocomelon was #5 on the most-streamed programs in 2023).

Cocomelon is the crown jewel of Moonbug Entertainment, a children’s media company that was acquired for $3B in 2021 by Candle Media (a media venture founded by two former leading Disney executives).

Clearly, these two shows are very popular but that is where the similarities end.

Bluey is created by an auteur with a unique and hilarious point of view on the world. Conversely, Cocomelon — which started on YouTube — is algorithmic slop that has been called “crack for kids” and is probably as educational as taping strobe lights to your child’s eyeballs.

Let me explain.

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The Bluey process

Bluey debuted in 2018 and has cranked out 152 episodes — about 7 minutes each — across three seasons. The 153rd episode is scheduled for April 14 and many believe that it will be the end of the show in its current form (more on this later).

The show was created by Joe Brumm, an Australian who started his professional career in the UK's TV animation industry. Before returning to Australia in 2009, Brumm worked on successful children’s shows including Charlie & Lola and Peppa Pig (Peppa’s production company Entertainment One sold the brand to Hasbro for a whopping $4B in 2019).

In 2015, Brumm teamed up with Brisbane-based Ludo Studios to shop a 1-minute teaser of Bluey. This short version of the show failed to find a buyer because the target audience wasn’t clear. Was it meant for adults or children? The confusion stemmed from the fact that Brumm had originally planned to create an R-rated version of Peppa Pig.

Ultimately, Brumm decided to make a show for preschoolers. He pulled material from his own life as a father of two girls under the age of 10.

With the kid focus, Ludo convinced the country’s national broadcaster (Australian Broadcasting Corporation aka ABC) to give Brumm $13k for a single 5-minute episode. ABC saw the potential and greenlit $5m+ for a first season. Unable to foot the whole bill, ABC partnered with BBC Studios, the business arm of the UK’s national broadcaster. BBC negotiated the global distribution, licensing and merchandising rights for Bluey (in other words, ABC is barely profiting from one of the country’s largest cultural exports since Mad Max, AC/DC, Kylie Minogue, Crocodile Dundee or Men at Work).

How did Bluey become such a hit?

It has great animation with funny and emotional writing that parents want to watch with their kids. I mentioned hungover parenting as one theme but Bluey has ably dealt with many grown-up topics including infertility, mental health and death.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Brumm said he chose this approach because he noticed a gap in the market. He wanted “a good co-viewing show where the parents could genuinely watch it with the kids” and there weren’t many options for the “the preschool stage”.

The co-viewing magic happens because the show’s parents (Bandi, Chilli) are just as integral to the storyline as the kids (Bluey, Bingo). Preschoolers love inventing games and making their parents play with them. It is their way of learning how the world works.

Bluey is a mix of games that every parent knows (“driving a bus”, “keepy uppy with a balloon” or “cardboard box forts”) as well as games that Brumm has pulled from his own life (“Magic Xylophone” or “The Magic Claw”).

How does Brumm come up with these ideas? In the most parenting way possible as he explained on the How Other Dads Dad podcast:

[The games on Bluey are] just games that evolved at 5 in the morning [while taking care of the kids]. And “evolve” is a good word because some games you play once and they're a bit boring and they just fall away.

Others you find, “Hey, can we play that game again?”

And you're like, “Yeah, all right and let's add this.”

Two months later [that game has] got a name.

The uniqueness of each game comes through particularly well because Brumm has written nearly every episode on his own. The solo process was a deliberate choice because — coming from a TV background — Brumm knew that a team of TV writers would likely lead to a formulaic product.

There is no magic to the writing, either.

In a relatable passage for any writer, Brumm tells the Gotta Be Done podcast how he gets an idea on paper and then edits and edits:

I think the first thing I've realized is…just write [the first draft quickly] and don't show anyone because it is terrible. […] Know that it is going to suck and it is going to be all over the place.

But then it's there. Then I print it out. Then I go lie on a couch and it looks like I'm loafing, but then it's just scribbling. Let's move this here…cut it up and rearrange it on the table.

You've just got to write that first draft.

Bluey’s distinctiveness also comes from the voice actors, who are actual children from Brisbane. When the show was being shopped internationally, many buyers — including Disney — wanted to re-record the voices. However, Brumm fought to keep the Aussie accents and this decision definitely helps the show stand out.

I'll add one more Aussie-related fun fact. The "Heeler" family is named after the Blue Heeler dogs, herding dogs specially bred in Australia in the mid-1800s to shepherd cattle over long distances (also known as "cattle dogs"). In a nice symmetry to how Bluey is making waves internationally, these dogs were once a major export for the country. The show’s popularity has led to some people buying Blue Heelers as a pet for their kids…which will probably backfire because they aren’t meant to be house dogs (Blue Heelers need an insane amount of exercise and can be pretty aggressive).

“[Making Bluey is] a craft thing,” Brumm said in the The Hollywood Reporter interview. “We really tried to get it to look beautiful and to sound beautiful. It should have its own score and its own visual style and really not just [be about] trying to knock it out for cheap.”

Add it all up and Brumm is telling a story that is uniquely his own.

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Cocomelon is processed

Some quick background on Cocomelon.

It started in 2006 as a children’s education YouTube channel called That’sMeOnTv.com.

Korean-American Jay Jeon and his wife created the channel with animated alphabet songs to teach children how to read. The channel rebranded twice before becoming Cocomelon in 2018. By this time, Jeon and a team of animators in California were creating 3D-animated videos of kids doing kids things while singing public domain nursery rhymes.

As more parents turned to YouTube to entertain their children, Cocomelon rocketed up the charts. It is currently the 3rd most popular channel on YouTube (with 174 million subscribers) and it does insane numbers. The channel has eight videos with over 2 billion views including “Bath Song”, “Wheels on the Bus”, “Baa Baa Black Sheep” and “Old MacDonald” (yes, I’ve heard all of these many many times).

By 2019, Jeon was making over $100 million a year in ad revenue.

Cocomelon cracked the YouTube algorithm the same way slot machines cracked gambling or TikTok cracked social video. It pushes every psychological button to keep a child’s attention:

• Cuts every 2-3 seconds

• So so so many different colors

• Lots of movement and panning on the screen

• Popular nursery rhymes remixed with upbeat tunes

• The sound of babies randomly cooing in the background (the kid equivalent of how radio ads play sirens as a way to grab your attention because people are always on the lookout for sirens while driving).

Cocomelon is the entertainment version of a Doritos chip: perfectly engineered digital junk food, with many parents complaining that “it’s responsible for their children's behavioral problems, including anger issues, ADHD, autism and speech delays”.

I’m not saying that there is direct causation but here’s a random 5-second GIF from Cocomelon that — even without sound — shows how it’s an overstimulation machine.

As for the audio, imagine the scene from Dumb & Dumber when Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels make “the worst sound ever”. That’s what it feels like for an adult to listen to Cocomelon on loop (also: Cocomelon would be more forgivable in my books if the dad wasn’t such a pushover).

In 2022, the New York Times published a fascinating write-up on Moonbug Entertainment and how the studio creates videos (its kid show portfolio includes Little Baby Bum, Blippi, Playtime with Twinkle and The Sharksons among others).

Before getting into Moonbug's process, take a moment to remember Brumm's process. He is basing his work on real-life social play and his "5am" interactions with his children. For each idea, he navigates a writing maze and incorporates adult themes to develop the ideal 7-minute co-viewing experience.

It is craftsmanship.

Contrast everything I just wrote with Moonbug’s “audience research day”:

Once a month, children are brought to [a London studio], one at a time, and shown a handful of episodes to figure out exactly which parts of the shows are engaging and which are tuned out.

For anyone older than 2 years old, the team deploys a whimsically named tool: the Distractatron.

It’s a small TV screen, placed a few feet from the larger one, that plays a continuous loop of banal, real-world scenes — a guy pouring a cup of coffee, someone getting a haircut — each lasting about 20 seconds. Whenever a youngster looks away from the Moonbug show to glimpse the Distractatron, a note is jotted down.

“It’s not mega-interesting, what’s on the Distractatron,” said Maurice Wheeler, who runs the research group. “But if they aren’t fully focused, they might go, ‘Oh, what’s that?’ and kind of drift over. We can see what they’re looking at and the exact moment when they got distracted.”

I repeat: a “Distractatron”.

Brumm recently launched the Behind Bluey podcast. In it, Brumm talks to various team members (animators, voice actors etc.) about creating the show. I haven’t listened to all of the episodes yet but I’m guessing…THEY DON’T USE A F—ING DISTRACTATRON!!!

Here is more from the NYT:

Outside this office, some 270 employees are working on Moonbug shows in the company’s headquarters, a sleek, open-plan space on one floor of a four-story building beside a canal in Camden Town, a district in northwest London. Pre- and post- production are handled here and in the United States, where the company has another 120 staffers, mostly in Los Angeles. The company works with animators around the world.

Those hands are nothing if not data driven. [Moonbug Entertainment CEO] René Rechtman has a background in private equity and is more of an algorithm guy than an artist. Shows at Moonbug are honed in ways that leave little to chance, and audience research commences long before any episode gets near the Distractatron.

A data and analytics team sifts constantly through YouTube numbers to determine exactly what resonates. Should a girl wear black jeans or blue jeans? Should the music be louder or softer? Should the bus be yellow or red?

Yellow, is the answer.

“Kids love yellow buses around the world,” said David Levine, the chief content officer at Moonbug. “In some countries, yellow buses are actually used to transport prisoners. But still, kids around the world love to see yellow buses and kids on yellow buses.”

Infants are also enamored with objects covered in a little dirt, like they’ve been rolling around on the ground. And they’re fascinated by minor injuries. Not broken legs or gruesome wounds. More like small cuts that require Band-Aids.

“The trifecta for a kid would be a dirty yellow bus that has a boo-boo,” Levine said. “Broken fender, broken wheel, little grimace on its face.”

Moonbug has Cocomelon down to a science. It is an assembly line — a very lucrative assembly line — that is feeding YouTube’s algorithm and Netflix’s kid show tab.

Bluey has a creative process.

Cocomelon is processed.

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Final Thoughts

Listen, I know I’m going pretty hard on Cocomelon.

Parenting is difficult.

I get it.

Cocomelon is a digital babysitter for time-strapped caregivers. I won’t pretend like I haven’t stuck an iPad in front of my son and let him watch Cocomelon or Blippi so I could get some work done. Guilty as charged.

The show has more educational content compared to other popular YouTube kids genres including toy unboxings, Hot Wheels on ramps or that time the algo was recomnending creepy videos with headless comic-book characters.

It is more than just “taping strobe lights to your child’s eyeballs”. But there are just better options than Cocomelon for YouTube and streaming imo (including Bluey, of course).

The Moonbug team did raise a larger point in the NYT article: Cocomelon is not meant to be a substitute for normal play. “It just should not replace the time you’re outside bicycling,” says Rechtman. “Or outside playing with your friends. That’s for sure.”

Same goes for Bluey. While it is a superior shared experience, watching the show with my son will never be better than biking with him at the park or playing his invented games (including ones from Bluey that he loves and adapts).

Let’s put the parenting aspect of these shows aside and talk about Bluey vs. Cocomelon as a view on art and media.

Cocomelon is as formulaic as it gets. There are countless Cocomelon knock-offs on YouTube right now because it’s so easy to knock off. Take a nursery rhyme from the public domain. Slap on some colorful animation. Pack the YouTube video with the correct keywords. Maybe even pay for some algorithmic-boosting secret sauce.

Next thing you know, the top YouTube search result for “Wheels on the Bus” is a Cocomelon knock-off called Lalafun Nursery Rhymes.

Every new iteration of AI will make it easier and easier to create a "Cocomelon" clone.

However, do you know what AI isn't capable of producing today or in the foreseeable future? A thoughtful 7-minute episode about hungover parenting that is equally enjoyable for parents and kids.

In the face of the upcoming AI-powered content deluge, I keep going back to this quote that music super-producer Rick Rubin mentioned on the Joe Rogan podcast:

“Everything I do is just personal taste and it’s what the book is about. Really, for [people and artists] to trust in themselves. Make something that speaks to themselves. And hopefully someone else will like it. But you can’t second-guess your own taste for what someone else is going to like. It won’t be good. We’re not smart enough to know what someone else will like.

To make something and say, ‘well, I don’t really like it but I think this group of people will like it’, I think [that approach] is a bad way to play the game of music or art. Do what’s personal to you, take it as far you can go. Really push the boundaries and people will resonate with it if they are supposed to resonate with it. But you can’t get there the other way. The other way is a dead-end path.”

That basically describes Cocomelon vs. Bluey.

The former works off of a formula for what the audience might like. The latter is an expression of a single person’s unique taste.

Brumm echoed a similar thought as Rubin when asked on the Gotta Be Done podcast if he chose characters and plot lines with a marketing lens:

Look, I suppose the one thing I did not want to do was approach [Bluey] from a marketing point of view. […] My approach was, well, I'm just going to make something that's good and…that will be the marketing decision. Let's just make something that's good.

This is the approach that gave us “Sleepytime”, which is about sleep training toddlers and is probably the episode of Bluey that parents love the most. It transcends “children’s content” and embodies a Robin Williams quote from the film Dead Poets Society which Brumm cites as inspiration:

“Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are all noble pursuits, and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”

I write all of this knowing that there is a finite amount of Bluey-caliber content.

Cocomelon is McDonald’s and Bluey is a Michelin restaurant. There is a place in the market for both but McDonald’s has a much more repeatable model.

The challenge of keeping up the Michelin quality is a concern for Bluey with many fans worried that Brumm is leaving the show. The season 3 finale — which will air on April 14 — is unusually long (clocking in at 28 minutes) and is titled "The Sign" (leading theorists to believe it may refer to a moving sign for the Heeler family).

Why would Brumm leave? His daughters have gotten older (which means less material). Meanwhile, the voice actors — including some Brisbane-based children — are also getting older (which means their voices are changing).

The brand is so valuable and BBC/Ludo will find a way to milk it. There is already a live play and talk of a film.

But without Brumm, the TV show will lose its unique soul…like that part in the “Whale Watching” episode when Chilli asks Bandit to get some chips and sour cream dip to help her recover from the hangover. I’ve done that at least 100x for my wife and snickered when Chilli made the request. My son was none the wiser and that’s what made the co-viewing experience so great.

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Links and Memes

Instagram’s revenue revealed: Zuck Daddy Flex acquired Instagram for $1B in 2012. Most tech media folks roasted him. How could he spend 9-figures on a 12-person team making little revenue? It was obviously a prescient move and often called the best tech deal ever along with Google acquiring YouTube for $1.7B in 2006.

Thanks to a recent court filing, we know IG's revenue figures and it's a beast: 2018 ($11.3B), 2019 ($17.9B), 2020 ($22.0B) and 2021 ($32.4B). IG now represents ~30% of Meta’s revenue (the main Facebook app is still huge but its growth has slowed a lot in recent years…we’d live in a different tech world without the deal).

Also of note: Tanay Jaipuria writes that Instagram makes more “in ad revenue than YouTube (and likely at much higher gross margins!)”…due to YouTube’s revenue share program, which pays out 55% of revenue to creators (including kid-friendly content that rhymes with “MocoCelon”).

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Airbnb’s Solar Eclipse business: I’ll be honest. I had no idea that the Total Solar Eclipse was happening until I saw some memes on X about it. This was bad planning because my son says he wants to see one but the next North American total eclipse isn’t until 2044. Other people definitely saw it, with the eclipse-related economic impact in the US estimated at $6B (that is Taylor Swift levels).

Within that spending, The Economist detailed the business of short-term home rentals:

• The eclipse path in the US was 180km wide

• There were 92,000 Airbnb and VRBO rentals in the path

• 92% occupancy on the Sunday night (vs. 30% for a normal April weekend)

• Average booking was $269 (only 10% above the prior week)

An interesting detail: most of the Airbnb rentals were booked two months in advance, which is why the customers locked in a good price. Major hotel/motel chains — much more business conscious — jacked up prices by 50% to 100%.

When you add up the higher occupancy and slight room rate bump, the solar eclipse was a cumulative revenue bump of $44m for Airbnb/VRBO. My napkin math says these homeowners left ~$10m on the table by not doing a hotel chain mark-up. Now I just need to wait 20 years to jump on this vacation deal.

PS. Read Tim Urban’s Wait But Why on why you will really want to go to the 2044 total solar eclipse if North America is the easiest spot for you to see it.

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OJ Simpson Dead at 76: The first 15 minutes of this Bill Simmons' podcast provide a good overview of how significant the OJ Murder Trial was in the mid-1990s as a cultural and societal event. OJ was so famous and the coverage so intense that Simmons describes it as his generation's "JFK" moment.

I distinctly recall where I was for the "not guilty" verdict. It was during recess at my elementary school when the principal announced it on the loudspeaker. Keep in mind, this was a small school in Vancouver, Canada (OJ obviously did it and the other memory I had of that period was this wild Tim Meadows SNL opening bit about the trial).

The only other comparable announcement my school made while I was there was Princess Diana's death. President Clinton’s — aka Slick Willy’s — scandal with Monica Lewinsky ranks up there too on the cultural impact scale but my school (understandably) skipped that announcement. These were probably the last three major major cultural events pre-internet.

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Some other baller links:

• “The Most Offensively Taboo Idea in Western Civilization”: A thought-provoking musing on left vs. right brain and the power of curiosity. (A Letter A Day)

• What’s up with NPR? A NPR veteran penned a viral article titled “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.” (The Free Press)

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…and here them fire X posts (including this feature that Netflix should really really consider):

Finally, the best meme round-up last week was the New York earthquake. A natural phenomenon won again this week with those baller solar eclipse memes.