The toddler’s face is glowing green from the tablet in her hands, which shows a cartoon boy singing a nursery rhyme and dancing with dinosaurs. The toddler doesn’t know what dinosaurs are or what the lyrics mean, but she’s so entranced that she doesn’t blink when her mother calls her name. “It’s literally like crack for her,” says her mom Meng Zhou at their home in Redwood City, Calif.
“It” is CoComelon, which may be the most streamed children’s entertainment program in the world. The show was watched for 33 billion minutes last year, more than the Netflix hits Squid Game and Bridgerton combined, according to market-measurement firm Nielsen. CoComelon had 3.6 billion views on YouTube in January, according to Tubular, a social-video measurement company, as many as three-quarters of whom were from outside the U.S. CoComelon was a Top 10 show on Netflix for more than 100 straight days in 2021, and its music is streamed 1.3 million times a day on Spotify.
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