This finding is just one of the many insights gleaned from Ofcom’s recent annual research regarding children’s and teen’s online lives, with the 2023 study going in-depth into areas such as their digital content consumption and interaction.

The trend of children consuming more professionalised, polished, commercial content was pinpointed in last year’s study; in 2023, however, it’s much more noticeable. “This year, this trend has become more pronounced. The content that children were consuming on their social media feeds was often produced for commercial purposes by companies or influencers, or appeared to be pursuing commercial goals, if not actually generating revenue,” the report’s authors wrote.

“This meant that although some of the younger children in the sample saw some content from other children in less polished formats, most of the children’s social media feeds were saturated with ‘professionalised’ content from people they did not know.”

Due to the rise of professionalised and carefully-considered content from countless digital content creators, many of the children interviewed feel hesitant, self-conscious, and concerned about posting on social media themselves, in fear of judgement or embarrassment.

This has then resulted in children being even more careful about posting content publicly in 2023, preferring to restrict and limit the viewability of what they do post, keeping content private or using specific, close friends-only accounts to share within tight-knit circles. Statistically-speaking, children are less likely to post their own videos on social media (32%) than watch them (96%).

The proliferation of professionalised content has also had a knock-on effect when it comes to how much — or rather, how little — content from friends they’re seeing.

As the report’s authors wrote: “The children were seeing less content produced by people they knew on their social media feeds this year than in previous waves of research. And when they did see posts from their friends, they interacted with them less than they had done formerly, restricting themselves to liking their friends’ posts or occasionally leaving a comment. As described in ‘How were the children interacting online’, social media feeds had become less of a place for the children to socialise and more of a platform where they consumed content, some more actively than others.”

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Where are children going to watch content in 2023?
Relatedly, the study also found — perhaps unsurprisingly — that TikTok wasn’t only the social media app of choice of children, but that app is also essentially a portal for consumption, as opposed to interaction.

“For the majority of the children who had TikTok on their personal devices, this was the app they used more than any other, with only one exception. TikTok was mainly used for entertainment. The children enjoyed consuming short-form content served on their For You page, which typically lasted up to one minute. However, while the children watched a lot of content on TikTok, they rarely created or shared self-produced content themselves,” wrote the report’s authors.

Similarly, the study found that short-form content was often viewed by children on other platforms and their sister platforms and products, like YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels. YouTube itself was often used to watch longer-form content by nearly all of the children interviewed, with the content typically ranging from five to 30 minutes in length.

What’s keeping children engaged?
Children continue to be drawn to “dramatic” social media content that’s been intentionally created to drive and keep the attention of the viewer engaged, relying on conflict, controversy, gossip, and high stakes to do so. “Commentary” and “reaction” videos continue to appeal to children, reinforcing the trend of consumption over interaction.

According to the report, this year also saw the rise of “split-screening”: where the viewer can watch more than one short-form video at a time as part of a single post, with the videos sometimes being completely unrelated. Children previously reported to Ofcom that they had difficulties paying attention to one screen-based activity at a time.

The Children’s Media Lives 2023 study can be read in full here.