Does YouTube Kids have ads? What they are and what you can change

Your five-year-old is watching a cartoon in YouTube Kids, and a toy ad plays before it starts. The cartoon ends, and the next video is a pair of hands opening a dozen surprise eggs for twenty minutes. You chose the kids' app because it was meant to be the safe one, and now you are asking the question most parents get to in the first week: does YouTube Kids have ads?

Yes, it does. YouTube Kids shows paid ads, under rules that are stricter than on main YouTube. It also shows a second kind of selling that no setting labels as advertising, and that second kind is usually what parents mean when they say the app is full of ads. This guide explains both, what Google's rules allow, what YouTube Premium changes, and what you can change without paying.

Does YouTube Kids have ads? Yes, with rules

Google's own help page for the app says it plainly: YouTube Kids shows paid ads, and that is how the app stays free.^{[1]“YouTube Kids Help: Ads in YouTube Kids”.} The ads are short video ads that play before some videos. Google says every paid ad in YouTube Kids goes through a review for the app, on top of the normal review for YouTube, and that a short intro clip plays before a paid ad so that a child can tell the ad from the video.^{[1]“YouTube Kids Help: Ads in YouTube Kids”.}

Three rules matter most for parents. The ads are not personalised: Google says they are not based on your child's interests or on what the profile has watched.^{[1]“YouTube Kids Help: Ads in YouTube Kids”.} The ads cannot be tapped through to a website, an app store or a shop, so a curious finger does not land anywhere.^{[2]“YouTube Help: Advertising on YouTube Kids”.} And whole categories of products are not allowed. Google's advertising policy for the app rules out food and drink, beauty and fitness, dating, political and religious ads, and anything that is not suitable for a general audience of children.^{[2]“YouTube Help: Advertising on YouTube Kids”.} Toys, films, games and family products are allowed, which is why most of the ads your child sees are for exactly those things.

How many ads a child sees depends on the videos. A creator can turn off ads on a video, and some public broadcasters and educational channels do. Others leave them on. There is no way to tell from the outside, and no setting in the app that changes the frequency.

The ads that are not called ads

The second kind of advertising is harder to see, because YouTube does not count it as advertising at all. Google's help page is clear that videos uploaded by creators are not paid ads, even when they show products or include endorsements.^{[1]“YouTube Kids Help: Ads in YouTube Kids”.} A video of someone opening toys, a candy haul, a tour of a child's bedroom full of branded merchandise, a game played in a shop's own costume: all of these are ordinary videos in the system's eyes.

To a four-year-old they are commercials, and long ones. A paid ad lasts seconds. An unboxing video lasts as long as the box has layers. The American Academy of Pediatrics looked at exactly this in its 2020 policy statement on digital advertising to children. Children under about 8 do not reliably recognise that something is trying to persuade them, and even older children struggle with formats that mix a person they like with a product, such as influencer videos and unboxings.^{[4]“American Academy of Pediatrics: Digital Advertising to Children, policy statement (Pediatrics, July 2020)”.} The Academy also notes that the brands behind these videos are often the same brands that buy the paid ads, so the two kinds reinforce each other.^{[4]“American Academy of Pediatrics: Digital Advertising to Children, policy statement (Pediatrics, July 2020)”.}

YouTube asks creators to disclose paid promotions and applies tighter rules to videos made for kids. That helps with the most blatant cases. It does not change what a child sees, because a creator who buys a toy with their own money and films the unwrapping has broken no rule. The video still shows a child a toy for twenty minutes.

This is why ad settings disappoint parents. Nothing you can switch touches the product videos, because to the app they are content. The only lever that works is choosing which channels your child sees, and the sections below are about that lever.

Why the ads are not personalised: the 2019 settlement

In September 2019 the US Federal Trade Commission announced that Google and YouTube would pay 170 million dollars to settle allegations that YouTube had collected personal data from children watching child-directed channels, without their parents' consent, and used it for personalised ads.^{[3]“Federal Trade Commission: Google and YouTube will pay record $170 million for alleged violations of children's privacy law (4 September 2019)”.} The case was about main YouTube, not the YouTube Kids app, but it changed both.

After the settlement, every creator has to mark videos as made for kids or not. Made-for-kids videos get no personalised ads, no comments and no notifications, whether a child watches them on main YouTube or in YouTube Kids.^{[3]“Federal Trade Commission: Google and YouTube will pay record $170 million for alleged violations of children's privacy law (4 September 2019)”.} Ads on those videos are chosen to match the video, not the viewer. In YouTube Kids, ads were never personalised, and the app does not need an account for the child; the profile sits under your Google Account.^{[1]“YouTube Kids Help: Ads in YouTube Kids”.}

For a parent this has a practical meaning. A toy ad before a toy video is not a sign that the app has learned what your child wants. It is a sign that the advertiser chose toy videos. The data side of the app, including what the profile records and how to clear it, is in our guide on whether YouTube Kids is safe.

What you can change in YouTube Kids

These steps are in order of how much they change. Menu names follow Google's help pages; look for the nearest match if yours differ.

1. Switch on Approve content yourself. Open YouTube Kids, tap the lock, choose your child's profile, open Edit settings and switch on Approve content yourself. Your child now sees only the channels, videos and collections you approved, and search is off. Paid ads can still play before a video, but a toy channel you never chose cannot appear at all. This is the setting that removes most of the selling, and it is free.
2. Turn search off if you stay with an age setting instead. Most product videos reach a child through search and the rows under a video, not through the home screen.
3. Block the channel when a product video shows up anyway. Tap the three dots on the video and choose to block the video or the whole channel. The block applies to that profile only and does not catch the same videos re-uploaded elsewhere, so it is a backstop, not a plan.
4. Disable autoplay for the profile from Family Center in your own YouTube app, so one cartoon does not run straight into a toy haul. Where the switch sits on each device is in our guide on how to turn off autoplay on YouTube for kids.
5. Pay for YouTube Premium if the paid ads themselves are the problem. Google says a YouTube Premium membership removes the paid ads in YouTube Kids for the profiles under your account, and it is the only way Google offers to do that.^{[1]“YouTube Kids Help: Ads in YouTube Kids”.} It does nothing about product videos.
6. Name the selling out loud. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that parents watch with their child and point out when a video is trying to sell something, because recognising persuasion is a skill children learn, not one they are born with.^{[4]“American Academy of Pediatrics: Digital Advertising to Children, policy statement (Pediatrics, July 2020)”.} "What does this video want you to ask for?" is a good question for a six-year-old.

If you only do one thing, do the first. Approve content yourself is a short list of channels with nothing behind it, and a short list is the only thing that keeps both kinds of advertising to a minimum.

Ads on main YouTube with a supervised account

From about 9, many children move from YouTube Kids to a supervised account on main YouTube. The ad rules change with them. A supervised account switches off personalised ads, but ads still play, and the ad categories are the normal YouTube ones for the content setting you chose, not the shorter YouTube Kids list.^{[2]“YouTube Help: Advertising on YouTube Kids”.} Product videos are far more common on main YouTube, because the catalogue is the whole site. YouTube Premium covers supervised accounts in a family plan in the same way.

Setting up a supervised account, the content settings and the blocklist are all in our guide to YouTube parental controls. The honest summary is that the controls limit what kind of video appears, not whether an ad runs before it.

What a whitelist player changes, and what it does not

Some parents get this far and decide that the problem is not the thirty seconds before the video. It is the twenty minutes after it, served by a system they never asked. For them the fix is a player with no pool at all.

Pepelly is a video player for children from 3 to 12 that plays only the YouTube channels you approved. There are no recommendations, no search across YouTube, no Shorts and no autoplay, so a toy channel you did not choose has no way in. A product video can still appear if one of your approved channels uploads it, which is why it pays to look at a channel's recent videos before you add it. The free plan covers one child, ten channels and a daily limit, and your child can ask for a channel from inside the app.

Videos play in the official YouTube player, and Pepelly does not remove YouTube ads. If a channel runs ads, those ads play in Pepelly too. Pepelly is not affiliated with YouTube or Google. See how Pepelly works, or start with the list in our guide to the best YouTube channels for kids, which also explains how to tell an official channel from a re-upload.

Does YouTube Kids have ads? Yes, two kinds. The paid ones are reviewed, short and impersonal, and only YouTube Premium removes them. The other kind is longer, looks like a video and is only kept out by the list of channels you choose. The list is the work, in every app.