Why we built KidsPlaylist

The problem, from someone who lived it

My name is Zachary Aagesen. I am a web developer and the founder of Novustella, a web agency based in Denmark. I am also a parent, and like a lot of parents, I spent a long time trying to make YouTube Kids work for my family.

The frustration was always the same. My kids would start watching something reasonable, and within a few videos the recommendations had drifted somewhere strange. Odd content. Videos in languages they did not understand. The algorithm clearly did not care that these were young children with no interest in what it was serving them. It just kept going, chasing watch time.

The natural response as a parent is to lock things down. And you can, to some extent. But the tighter you restricted YouTube Kids, the worse the app became to actually use. My kids did not want to use it anymore. The controls that were supposed to make it safer made the whole experience so clunky and annoying that they gave up on it. That left me with two bad options: uncontrolled access or no access at all.

The dead simple solution

What I actually wanted was stupidly simple: a list of videos I chose, and nothing else. No recommendations. No algorithm. No next-up suggestions. Just the videos I had put on the list, in a player my kids could actually use without frustration.

So I built it. KidsPlaylist is a thin layer on top of YouTube. You paste in YouTube URLs you approve, and kids see only those videos in a clean, fullscreen player. There is no search bar for them to use. No recommendations sidebar. No autoplay chain leading somewhere you never intended. When a video ends, the next video in your list plays. That is the whole product.

It took a weekend to build the first version. It has since grown into something more robust, with cross-device sync via family codes, so the approved playlist works on every screen in the house. But the philosophy has not changed: the fewer features a kids video player has, the better.

Why this matters right now

The issue with algorithmic recommendations and children is not just a parental concern. In 2019, Google paid a $170 million FTC settlement for COPPA violations related to YouTube Kids, which at the time was the largest civil penalty the FTC had ever obtained for a children's privacy case. Regulators, parents, and child safety researchers have continued to scrutinise how recommendation algorithms affect young viewers, and the conversation has only grown louder since.

KidsPlaylist does not claim to solve all of this. It is not a replacement for parental involvement, and it does not take any position on YouTube as a platform. What it does is remove the part of the experience that most parents find the hardest to manage: the algorithm deciding what comes next.

Who is behind this

KidsPlaylist is built and maintained by me, Zachary Aagesen, through my agency Novustella. It is a small, independent product. There is no investor to answer to, no growth target to hit, and no incentive to make the product more addictive. The goal is to be genuinely useful to parents and to keep it that way.

If you have feedback, a question, or just want to tell me what you think, email me directly at kontakt@novustella.dk. I read every message.