Emily cornered Sydney Bright at Kids Screen after she got mobbed following her panel — dropped a card in the middle of the crowd, said "come on the podcast," and here we are. Sydney is Head of Global Animation at WEBTOON, the world's leading digital comics platform with 145 million monthly active users, and her job is to identify titles from the platform ripe for adaptation and take them through to screen.

It's a genuinely different development model — one where audience investment is baked in before a single frame of animation is made. Sydney explains how WEBTOON tracks not just read counts but comment engagement, retention, and emotional intensity of fan response as signals for adaptation potential. The conversation gets into what it actually takes to translate a webcomic into animation, how to honour a fanbase that feels genuine ownership of a property, and why that kind of proven, community-built IP is increasingly what streamers want to see walk through the door.

There's a lot of ground covered — Wattpad's role within the same parent company, the upcoming Lore Olympus series with Amazon Prime, the titles on Sydney's radar for the 6 to 16 demographic, and what her animation students at Loyola Marymount are watching right now, which turns out to be a surprisingly useful window into where the industry is heading next.

A viral YouTube video calling Bluey's deal with the ABC "the shittest deal ever" has set Australian media alight — and sent Andy, Emily, and Jo straight to the recording button. The claim: zero dollars from Bluey's global success ever made it back to Australia. The reality, as the trio unpick it, is considerably more complicated.

This is a bonus episode that uses the viral moment as a jumping-off point for a much more interesting conversation: about what the ABC could realistically have done differently, why BBC Studios was able to turn Bluey into a global phenomenon when a public service broadcaster structurally couldn't, and what the whole debate exposes about the impossible tension at the heart of PSB commissioning everywhere.

• The "zero dollars back to Australia" claim doesn't hold up — Moose Toys' Bluey toy deal alone drove an estimated $800 million into the Australian economy, and is itself a strong example of the entrepreneurial Aussie spirit the video claims is absent.
• Hindsight makes Bluey look like an obvious bet — it wasn't — the deal was struck during a period of internal ABC disarray, at a moment when Disney+ was an enormous and unproven gamble. Nobody knew this would work.
• The ABC keeping the rights wouldn't automatically have produced the same outcome — BBC Studios had a specific YouTube-first, global distribution strategy and the infrastructure to execute it. The ABC still geoblocks Bluey and doesn't have a meaningful franchise team.
• Public service broadcasters are structurally constrained from thinking globally — their local taxpayer remit is both their purpose and their commercial ceiling, and that tension isn't going away.
• You can't engineer a Bluey by trying to make a Bluey — the shelf space for behemoth kids IP is finite, cycles slowly, and the creators who break through are focused on making something good, not replicating something that already exists.

The second episode in the Kids Media Club's sponsored series with WildBrain Media Solutions brings in Emma Witkowski, WildBrain's VP of Media Solutions. The topic is one the podcast has been circling for a while: kids and family audiences have migrated to YouTube and FAST, but the advertising money largely hasn't followed — and the reasons are more structural than most people in the industry realise.

Emma unpacks why the standard programmatic buying infrastructure effectively locks advertisers out of Made for Kids environments, why COPPA compliance is being misread as a liability when it should be a selling point, and why Gen Alpha's influence on household purchasing decisions makes this audience far more commercially valuable than the ad market currently prices in.

It's a practical, clear-eyed conversation about how kids media gets funded, why that funding model is under pressure, and what a better approach looks like — essential listening for anyone working in or around kids content who needs to get their head around the ad landscape in 2026.

Key Takeaways:

• Ad dollars haven't followed the audience because the buying infrastructure is broken for kids — major DSPs either block Made for Kids inventory or have it turned off by default, and most brands don't know why.
• COPPA compliance is being misread as a barrier when it should be a selling point — Made for Kids environments are among the most brand-safe digital spaces available, but they're invisible to data-driven programmatic platforms.
• Gen Alpha are the household CMO — 89% of parents say their kids influence travel decisions, 80% say kids influence where the family eats, and the influence extends to cars and subscriptions too.
• Trust is the new currency in kids advertising — parents who grew up with the internet are becoming more intentional about ad environments, and structural compliance is winning over reactive compliance.

Episode Title:

This is a special compilation episode revisiting two of the Kids Media Club's most popular conversations on kids online safety — with Ashley Mady from Zigazoo and Chris Heatherly, former General Manager of Club Penguin at Disney. With regulation around kids social media still very much in flux, it felt like the right moment to bring these two perspectives together.

Ashley walks through how Zigazoo works — challenge-based, fully moderated, no bots, no personally identifiable information — and makes the case that safe social media for kids isn't an oxymoron, it's a design choice. The platform's hybrid AI and human moderation model, its age-gated content tiers, and its wishlist-to-parent email feature all point to what's possible when child wellbeing is built into the product from the ground up rather than bolted on afterwards. When TikTok faced its US ban and new users flooded in, existing Zigazoo kids told them how to behave — which is probably the most compelling endorsement of a platform's culture imaginable.

Chris brings the historical weight. Club Penguin at its peak had 200 million registered avatars and was, as he puts it, the biggest playground in the world — and his job was to keep it safe and keep it fun. The corporate story is a cautionary one: Disney's MBA-led strategy teams couldn't quantify the value of community, and the platform was eventually shut down despite fierce internal opposition. But the emotional legacy Chris describes — kids who found belonging and identity on Club Penguin that they couldn't find at school — is a reminder of what's genuinely at stake when these platforms get it right.

A bonus episode with Andy and Jo, fresh off the plane from Content Europe in Lisbon, where both were on panels and Jo was moderating. Emily is absent this week, so the two debrief on the themes that dominated the conference.

The defining question that ran through almost every session was deceptively simple: what even is a hit anymore? A show can hit 200 million YouTube views and still not be financially viable. That gap between attention and money, Andy and Jo agree, is not self-correcting — and without investment flowing back in on terms that make sense for kids content, the market risks stalling further. The advertising conversation is equally candid, with Jo pointing to WildBrain Media Solutions and Lumi as two companies actively trying to solve the COPPA problem by taking kids YouTube inventory out of the programmatic black box and selling it directly to advertisers.

Jo closes with the sharpest observation of the episode: that kids media has quietly allowed tech company measurement frameworks — 28-day windows, engagement metrics, short-term return expectations — to define success in a space that has never worked that way. You can't speed run fandom. Patient capital is the only kind that works in kids media, and the industry needs to say so louder.

Key Takeaways:

1. "What is a hit?" is now genuinely an open question — the old definition (big linear partner, west coast origin, strong ratings) no longer holds, and the panel at Content Europe couldn't agree on a replacement, which is itself telling.
2. Attention and revenue have been decoupled, and the industry hasn't yet found a reliable way to bridge them. 200 million YouTube views doesn't automatically translate to financial viability for the producers who made the content.
3. WildBrain and Lumi are testing a direct sales model for kids YouTube inventory — selling contextually against known IP rather than through programmatic systems, which offers advertisers brand safety and producers a better commercial deal.
4. Connected TV co-viewing changes the advertising calculus — when a child watches YouTube on the living room TV, a parent is often in the room. That audience is more valuable and more brand-safe than mobile-first viewing, and the industry is only beginning to price that in.
5. Platform native, not platform everywhere — the shift observed across multiple Lisbon panels is from spray-and-pray digital distribution to intentional, platform-specific strategy: YouTube as top of funnel, FAST as destination viewing, streaming partners for deeper engagement.
6. Tech company measurement frameworks don't fit kids media — 28-day Netflix windows, short-term engagement metrics, and VC-style return expectations are being applied to an industry where fandom takes years to build and IP value compounds over decades.
7. Patient capital is the only capital that works in kids — and the industry needs to make that case more deliberately to investors, rather than trying to fit kids IP into frameworks designed for SaaS companies or adult entertainment.
8. The swing back to curated, intentional viewing is good news for kids content — audiences paralysed by infinite choice are gravitating back towards scheduled, lean-back experiences, which plays to the strengths of well-programmed kids IP on FAST and connected TV platforms.

This episode of the Kids Media Club Podcast is part of a sponsored series produced in partnership with WildBrain Media Solutions. We get together with Kate Smith, EVP of Audience Engagement at WildBrain to talk about what constitutes a TV Network in 2026.

Within the industry the term "distribution" has evolved. Kate opens by sharing how WildBrain has pioneered its own Network, driven by TV viewing insights. The company has quietly become one of the dominant operators in kids' FAST channels and on YouTube, holding over 50% of all kids and family channels across major FAST platforms in the US and operating 800 YouTube channels.

We explore how YouTube and FAST serve different but complementary functions — YouTube as a discovery engine, FAST as a destination for fans who already know what they want — and why legacy IP with multigenerational appeal continues to drive the strongest long-form viewing numbers.

1. https://bit.ly/WBMSCapabilities