How we collect our statistics
Website categorization
Among our home solutions is Kaspersky Safe Kids, which scans the content of web pages that children try to visit. If the site belongs to one of the 14 categories listed below, the product sends an anonymous notification to Kaspersky Security Network. No personal user data is transmitted.
It is up to the parent to decide which content to block by tweaking the settings; however, anonymous statistics are collected for all 14 categories.
The information in this report was collected from Windows PCs and laptops, as well as Android mobile devices.
Currently, the web filtering categories in Kaspersky Safe Kids are:
- Adult content
- Alcohol, tobacco, drugs
- Anonymizers
- Electronic commerce
- Gambling, lotteries, sweepstakes
- Internet communication
- Job search
- News media
- Profanity, obscenity
- Religions, religious associations
- Software, audio, video
- Video games
- Violence
- Weapons, explosives, pyrotechnics
Filtering search queries
Kids’ interests show up most clearly in their search activity. Kaspersky Safe Kids can filter kids’ searches in five engines (Bing, Google, Mail.ru, Yahoo!, Yandex), as well as on YouTube. Searches are filtered on six potentially dangerous topics: Adult content, Alcohol, Narcotics, Tobacco, Racism, and Profanity.
This report presents statistics on search queries on the YouTube platform and Google’s search engine. The data collected is for the period March–April 2024. We took as 100% the total number of hits returned by the Top 1,000 search queries on YouTube and by the Top 500 on Google. The ranking is based on the frequency of queries regardless of the region. The popularity of a topic is the percentage of queries related to that topic.
We divided the search queries into thematic categories and subcategories:
Google:
- Movies, cartoons, TV shows
- Music
- Shops
- Other
- Education
- Sport
- Games
- Video streaming platform
- Communication
- Social Nets
- Messengers
- Apps and tools
- Translate
- AI
- Edit tool
- Docs
- Search engine
YouTube:
- Games
- Movies, cartoons, TV shows
- Cartoons
- TV shows
- Movies
- Anime
- Music
- Other
- Toys
- TikTok
- News
- DIY
- Education blogger
- Education
- Gacha Life
- Adult
- Trend
- ASMR
- Meme
- Sport
- YouTube bloggers and channels
- YouTube gaming influencer
Application control
Kaspersky Safe Kids allows parents to control and limit the time that their children spend using apps on their devices. This study uses anonymized data on how much time kids worldwide spend using apps on Android and Windows devices.
We identified the Top 20 most popular apps. The total time spent in all these apps is taken as 100%. Thus, the share of each app in the rating reflects what percentage of the total time children spent on it.
Popular website categories
The sites that children visited most frequently over the past year vary slightly depending on the platform. For example, if using a computer or laptop, children visited sites in the Software, audio, video category far more often (55.49% on Windows versus 32.55% on Android). This category includes YouTube, Netflix, Spotify and other streaming services. This preference for Windows is not surprising, since children prefer to use apps on smartphones and tablets (we’ll see the evidence shortly) rather than browser versions of websites.
Here are various social networks, messengers, forums and chats (the Internet communication category) that kids visit more often on mobile devices: 35.40% on Android versus 24.27% on Windows.
More often on Android than Windows, kids visited sites in the Electronic commerce (7.80%) and Video games (6.82%) categories, and tried to access sites in the Adult content (5.27%) category more.
On Windows, they were more likely to visit sites in the following categories: News media (5.28%), Religions, religious associations (1.68%), Weapons, explosives, pyrotechnics (1.41%) and Anonymizers (0.47%), which includes various VPNs and proxy services. Interestingly, the Religions and Anonymizers categories on Android account for precisely 0%.
Most used apps
Android
As we noted earlier, YouTube accounts for the most time spent by kids on mobile devices (28.13% of the total time spent on the Top 20 apps). The YouTube Kids app makes up 2.47%, and YouTube Music just 0.59%.
The popularity rating of social networks among children looks as follows: in first place is the absolute favorite TikTok (14.71%), followed by Instagram (8.68%), then Snapchat (3.18%), Facebook (1.66%) and, in last place, Pinterest (0.86%).
Top messengers: WhatsApp leads by a wide margin (14.58% of the Top 20). In second place is Telegram (1.19%), then Facebook Messenger (1.07%), Discord (0.92%) and Viber (0.61%).
The most popular game on mobile devices is Roblox. Kids spent more time on it than any other Top 20 game (6.19%). Interestingly, Roblox’s eternal rival, Minecraft, lags a long behind in third place (0.82%), behind Brawl Stars (3.06%). The last game in the top ranking is the battle royale Free Fire (0.60%).
Windows
Laptops and PCs are used differently than smartphones, so the app landscape on Windows is different to what we’ve seen on Android.
Kids spend time on these devices mostly using browsers. No fewer than five of them made it into in the Top 20. The leader is Google Chrome (36.41%), which topped the ranking of most popular apps on Windows. Next come Microsoft Edge (13.16%), Firefox (4.22%), Opera GX (2.26%), a gaming version of Opera, and Brave (1.14%), which is positioned as privacy-oriented.
Besides internet surfing, children use Windows to chat, study – and chat during study. 9.62% of kids’ time on laptops is spent on Microsoft Office, 1.72% on Teams, 1.47% on Outlook, 1.35% on Zoom and 0.69% on Skype. Presumably, these apps are used specifically for study and communication during classes. For simple communication, kids go for WhatsApp (2.31%), Zalo (0.84%) and Telegram (0.48%).
Another not-insignificant function of PCs and laptops is gaming. The most popular game on Windows remains Roblox (7.60%). We put the gamer-oriented Discord messenger (7.55%) and Steam Client Webhelper (2.53%) in the same category.
Google searches
We determined which sites and which apps kids spend the most time on. Now let’s break down their interests. This involves analyzing the search query statistics.
First, we’ll look at what kids searched for on Google.
The lion’s share of search queries goes to the Apps and tools category (21.28%). Here we included queries related to a variety of AI assistants, document software, apps for photo and video editing, plus online translators. In second place are communication tools (19.39%) – a mix of messengers, social networks and email services. Third place among Google queries goes to the Video streaming platforms (17.87%) category, where the most popular queries are “youtube”, “netflix”, “twitch” and “123movies”. Next are games (11.04%), with the most popular searches being “roblox”, “poki” and “crazy games”.
Interestingly, a frequent search topic was sports, accounting for 11.01% of Google-based queries. The top queries here were “nba”, “premier league” and “real madrid”.
Education-related searches account for 8.57%. Popular queries on this topic include “scratch”, “classroom”, “duolingo” and, out of the blue, “climate change progress”. From this we can conclude that kids are interested in programming, foreign languages and environmental issues.
Apps and tools
Let’s take a closer look at the Apps and tools category. More than half of all queries here are for online translators (64.99%), the most popular of which is Google Translate. We also note that kids quite often search for AI assistants (15.01%), and presumably use them as well. The most popular queries on this topic are “chatgpt”, “character ai” and “gemini”. In the Edit tools (8.90%) category, kids most often searched for “canva” and “capcut”. When it came to document software (6.24%), they googled “google docs” and “office 365”.
Communication
In the Communication category we put queries related to the three main types of communication: Social Networks (47.79%), Messengers (33.25%) and Mail (18.96%). Most often, children searched for the social networks “instagram”, “facebook”, “pinterest” and “tiktok”, the messengers “whatsapp web”, “discord”, “zoom” and “telegram”, and the email services “gmail”, “hotmail” and “yahoo mail”.
YouTube searches
YouTube is the site most visited by kids, the app they spend the most time on, and the most popular video platform. To dig deeper into kids’ viewing interests, let’s take a look at the Top 1,000 queries on the platform.
YouTube gaming influencer
The largest share of queries went to the YouTube gaming influencer (20.67%) category. Here we included a range of gaming bloggers – streamers and reviewers. The most popular among kids, judging by the number of queries, were:
- In English – SSundee, Aphmau and KreekCraft;
- In Portuguese – Jazzghost and ProbIems;
- In German – Paluten and Benx;
- In Italian – WhenGamersFail ► Lyon;
- In French – ZetFar;
- In Spanish – GoDeiK.
YouTube bloggers and channels
In second place, with a 19.87% share, are queries in the YouTube bloggers and channels category. Here we include bloggers who produce content ranging from lifestyle to challenges, and other such channels. The undisputed leader in all languages is MrBeast. Alongside his official channel, there are lots of others where his videos are translated into other languages. MrBeast is currently the top YouTuber among the children’s audience. Other channels searched for by kids are:
- In English – SSSniperWolf and Sidemen;
- In Portuguese – Enaldinho;
- In German – ViktoriaSarina;
- In Italian – Space Family;
- In French – Michou;
- In Spanish – Fede Vigevani.
Other
Third place is taken by queries of a more general nature, which collectively received 19.40%. Let’s have a deeper look.
21.88% of them are sports-related queries, with “soccer”, “football” and “nba” being the most popular. A 16.29% share goes to memes. The most popular at present is Gegagedigedagedago, in which Roblox Male Face food sings “Cotton Eye Joe” by Rednex with misheard lyrics. See here for the story behind the meme, and here to listen to various versions of this musical masterpiece.
13.56% of queries are related to ASMR. Kids still enjoy “asmr eating” and other soothing sounds, such as falling rain or objects being tapped.
The Trends (9.58%) category covers search queries that don’t fit under any specific topic. For example, mukbang is originally a South Korean video genre where bloggers consume food while interacting with the audience. Kids also showed interest in “findom” and a variety of videos on the topic of “mentos”.
And there was no avoiding attempts to find X-rated videos – the Adult category accounts for 9.27% of queries in the Other category. Gacha Life is still full of, yes, life: related searches scored 6.87%.
Music
In fourth place in the Top 1,000 YouTube queries is the Music category with 17.12%. Kids most often searched for “phonk”, the tracks BABYMONSTER – SHEESH and JoJo Siwa – Karma, K-pop group BLACKPINK, Nightcore mixes and pop diva Taylor Swift.
Worth noting is the relative decline of the mega-popular K-poppers BTS, whose search query numbers now trail Olivia Rodrigo and even Kanye West’s video “¥$, Ye, Ty Dolla $ign – CARNIVAL ft. Playboi Carti & Rich The Kid”.
Movies, cartoons, TV shows
The Movies, cartoons, TV shows category accounts for 15.89% of the top YouTube searches.
We broke this section down into more detailed subcategories. The majority of queries are for cartoons (48.55%). In second place are various TV shows and series (31.84%), with films (10.01%) in third and anime (9.59%) in fourth.
The most popular cartoon-related queries were “msa” (My Story Animated), “1 second from animated movies” (video compilations of one-second clips from multiple cartoons) and Hazbin Hotel.
As for TV shows, the most popular queries are “dhar mann” (Dhar Mann Studios), “queen of tears” (a Korean series that aired in March–April 2024) and “avatar the last airbender” (the Netflix remake released in 2024).
On the topic of movies, kids most often searched for “rockdog3”, “new movie trailer” and “kung fu panda 4” (released in March 2024). As we mentioned, the statistics in this report are for March–April 2024.
Games
In last place by number of YouTube queries, with a share of 7.04%, are video games without reference to specific bloggers. The most popular searches are “fortnite”, “minecraft”, “brawl stars”, “roblox”, “genshin impact” and “Nintendo”.
A new face among the usual suspects is the horror game Subliminal. The official description reads: “Subliminal is a real-time software raytraced horror/puzzle game based on the concept of The Backrooms. Endless procedurally generated levels, bleeding edge lighting, hostile entities, liminal spaces, and a sense that something is not quite right…”
The game that inspired Subliminal, The Backrooms, was quite popular with kids a while back. Many big-name Let’s Players streamed it on their channels.
Although Subliminal hasn’t been officially released yet, interest in the game is heating up. The official website says: “Hey everyone, getting straight to the point, the release of SUBLIMINAL is being pushed back until later this year. We don’t have a specific month in mind at this time, but we are aiming for late 2024 and hoping that the delay is more than enough time.”
We hazard a guess that when released it will take the gaming world by storm (like The Backrooms, Poppy Playtime and many others before it).
Conclusion
According to our observations, kids’ interests have been fairly stable of late. Their favorite games are Roblox and Minecraft; their favorite music is phonk and K-pop; their favorite YouTubers are more or less the same. TikTok, Instagram and WhatsApp remain the most popular communication tools and social networks. YouTube and Netflix are the top platforms for watching videos, movies and TV series.
The most dynamic trends are seen in memes and games, which can be super popular one day and forgotten the next, replaced by something even newer.
It’s important to be aware of kids’ likes and interests, so as to better understand your child and build trusting relationships in the family. And don’t be frightened by every new trend that comes along – on closer inspection it’s probably quite harmless really.