The band is back together — and Jo has news. She's joined Coolabi as SVP of Digital, with a brief that includes Warrior Cats: a book IP 74 volumes deep, a Roblox game at 730 million visits, a Tencent animation in production, and one of the most voracious fandoms in kids media. It's a good segue into the episode's main subject.

Amazing Digital Circus was supposed to have a four-day cinema run. It's now been extended to eight weeks, has outgrossed every independent animated movie in its window, and is cosplay screenings are selling out. The trio use it to pick up the thread from last week's creator movie conversation — but this time with a focus on what it means structurally. Creators who own their IP are coming into rooms with broadcasters and studios from a position of security rather than permission, and the entertainment industry is only beginning to reckon with what that shift means for how rights deals get structured.

The conversation also takes a sharp turn into social media regulation and what an under-16 ban would actually mean for the kind of co-created fandom that put Amazing Digital Circus in cinemas in the first place — Kane Parsons, after all, taught himself Blender on Discord at 14. It's the episode's most unresolved and most important thread, and one the podcast will clearly be returning to.

A hosts' hangout with Andy and Jo, prompted by a conversation that has been running hot across LinkedIn all week: creator-made films are pulling audiences into cinemas in a way that Hollywood studios haven't managed for years. Backrooms — made by 20-year-old Kane Parsons who taught himself Blender during Covid — and Obsession, made by Cory Barker for under a million dollars, are both seeing successive weeks of audience growth in theatres. The last film to do that was E.T.

The conversation goes beyond the hot takes to ask what's actually driving it. Andy and Jo's argument is that this isn't really about filmmaking — it's about trust, built slowly, over years of showing up for an audience before it ever made commercial sense to do so. The parasocial relationships these creators have with their fans are something no studio can manufacture, and the co-created lore around something like Backrooms means audiences don't just watch the film — they feel they made it. Mr. Beast is the useful counterexample: so big he's effectively become the kind of corporate entity his audience was rooting against.

The episode then pivots to what all of this might mean for kids and teens media specifically — from the structural problem of COPPA preventing younger audiences from participating in the kind of creative sandpits that made Backrooms possible, to whether Roblox game adaptations like 99 Nights in the Forest could replicate the Minecraft movie moment, to the genuinely exciting question of what happens when this generation of creators starts having kids of their own.

A hosts' deep dive with Andy and Jo, recorded in the middle of a British heatwave with Emily absent. Jo has spent the last six months tracking the top 50 sports games on Roblox daily, and this episode is her five-takeaway breakdown of what that data reveals about how teenage sports fandom actually works — and how far behind most sports organisations are in understanding it.

The headline finding is counterintuitive: official, licensed sport consistently underperforms unofficial, developer-originated games on Roblox. The NFL, Premier League, and FIFA all have a presence on the platform; none of them come close to games built from scratch by teenage developers who simply love their sport. Jo's argument is that this isn't just a platform quirk — it's a window into how this generation relates to fandom itself. Volleyball, driven by the anime series Haikyuu, is currently one of the biggest sports categories on Roblox despite being nowhere near football in real-world popularity. Almost every top-performing sports game, across every sport, has an anime aesthetic. And the primary game loop isn't playing the sport — it's hanging out, looking good, and being social with friends. The tribal rituals of going to a match are being replicated in digital space, just dressed differently.

The episode is essential listening for anyone in sports media, rights ownership, or brand strategy who is trying to understand where the next generation of fans is actually spending their time — and why turning up on Roblox with broadcast-mode thinking and a calendar of big events is precisely the wrong approach.

Halle Stanford has spent almost 30 years at the Jim Henson Company — executive producing Fraggle Rock, creating Sid the Science Kid — and has just launched Wowsabout, a new puppet preschool special on PBS Kids about a guitar-playing hedgehog and a tree-loving pig out to see the wows of the world. It's the first preschool show built around the emotion of awe, and it's already outperforming existing PBS Kids IP on YouTube within two weeks of release.

The conversation covers how Wowsabout got made — and it wasn't through a conventional commissioning deal. Halle built a coalition of mission-aligned partners, leaned into the science behind awe in a way that opened unexpected doors, and had to be, as the Jim Henson Company calls her, the queen of pivot at every turn. There's also a robust defence of puppetry as a medium — Halle has thoughts on the "puppets don't travel" orthodoxy, and they're worth hearing.

Emily cornered Sydney Bright at Kids Screen after she got mobbed following her panel — dropped a card in the middle of the crowd, said "come on the podcast," and here we are. Sydney is Head of Global Animation at WEBTOON, the world's leading digital comics platform with 145 million monthly active users, and her job is to identify titles from the platform ripe for adaptation and take them through to screen.

It's a genuinely different development model — one where audience investment is baked in before a single frame of animation is made. Sydney explains how WEBTOON tracks not just read counts but comment engagement, retention, and emotional intensity of fan response as signals for adaptation potential. The conversation gets into what it actually takes to translate a webcomic into animation, how to honour a fanbase that feels genuine ownership of a property, and why that kind of proven, community-built IP is increasingly what streamers want to see walk through the door.

There's a lot of ground covered — Wattpad's role within the same parent company, the upcoming Lore Olympus series with Amazon Prime, the titles on Sydney's radar for the 6 to 16 demographic, and what her animation students at Loyola Marymount are watching right now, which turns out to be a surprisingly useful window into where the industry is heading next.

A viral YouTube video calling Bluey's deal with the ABC "the shittest deal ever" has set Australian media alight — and sent Andy, Emily, and Jo straight to the recording button. The claim: zero dollars from Bluey's global success ever made it back to Australia. The reality, as the trio unpick it, is considerably more complicated.

This is a bonus episode that uses the viral moment as a jumping-off point for a much more interesting conversation: about what the ABC could realistically have done differently, why BBC Studios was able to turn Bluey into a global phenomenon when a public service broadcaster structurally couldn't, and what the whole debate exposes about the impossible tension at the heart of PSB commissioning everywhere.

• The "zero dollars back to Australia" claim doesn't hold up — Moose Toys' Bluey toy deal alone drove an estimated $800 million into the Australian economy, and is itself a strong example of the entrepreneurial Aussie spirit the video claims is absent.
• Hindsight makes Bluey look like an obvious bet — it wasn't — the deal was struck during a period of internal ABC disarray, at a moment when Disney+ was an enormous and unproven gamble. Nobody knew this would work.
• The ABC keeping the rights wouldn't automatically have produced the same outcome — BBC Studios had a specific YouTube-first, global distribution strategy and the infrastructure to execute it. The ABC still geoblocks Bluey and doesn't have a meaningful franchise team.
• Public service broadcasters are structurally constrained from thinking globally — their local taxpayer remit is both their purpose and their commercial ceiling, and that tension isn't going away.
• You can't engineer a Bluey by trying to make a Bluey — the shelf space for behemoth kids IP is finite, cycles slowly, and the creators who break through are focused on making something good, not replicating something that already exists.

The second episode in the Kids Media Club's sponsored series with WildBrain Media Solutions brings in Emma Witkowski, WildBrain's VP of Media Solutions. The topic is one the podcast has been circling for a while: kids and family audiences have migrated to YouTube and FAST, but the advertising money largely hasn't followed — and the reasons are more structural than most people in the industry realise.

Emma unpacks why the standard programmatic buying infrastructure effectively locks advertisers out of Made for Kids environments, why COPPA compliance is being misread as a liability when it should be a selling point, and why Gen Alpha's influence on household purchasing decisions makes this audience far more commercially valuable than the ad market currently prices in.

It's a practical, clear-eyed conversation about how kids media gets funded, why that funding model is under pressure, and what a better approach looks like — essential listening for anyone working in or around kids content who needs to get their head around the ad landscape in 2026.

Key Takeaways:

• Ad dollars haven't followed the audience because the buying infrastructure is broken for kids — major DSPs either block Made for Kids inventory or have it turned off by default, and most brands don't know why.
• COPPA compliance is being misread as a barrier when it should be a selling point — Made for Kids environments are among the most brand-safe digital spaces available, but they're invisible to data-driven programmatic platforms.
• Gen Alpha are the household CMO — 89% of parents say their kids influence travel decisions, 80% say kids influence where the family eats, and the influence extends to cars and subscriptions too.
• Trust is the new currency in kids advertising — parents who grew up with the internet are becoming more intentional about ad environments, and structural compliance is winning over reactive compliance.

Episode Title:

This is a special compilation episode revisiting two of the Kids Media Club's most popular conversations on kids online safety — with Ashley Mady from Zigazoo and Chris Heatherly, former General Manager of Club Penguin at Disney. With regulation around kids social media still very much in flux, it felt like the right moment to bring these two perspectives together.

Ashley walks through how Zigazoo works — challenge-based, fully moderated, no bots, no personally identifiable information — and makes the case that safe social media for kids isn't an oxymoron, it's a design choice. The platform's hybrid AI and human moderation model, its age-gated content tiers, and its wishlist-to-parent email feature all point to what's possible when child wellbeing is built into the product from the ground up rather than bolted on afterwards. When TikTok faced its US ban and new users flooded in, existing Zigazoo kids told them how to behave — which is probably the most compelling endorsement of a platform's culture imaginable.

Chris brings the historical weight. Club Penguin at its peak had 200 million registered avatars and was, as he puts it, the biggest playground in the world — and his job was to keep it safe and keep it fun. The corporate story is a cautionary one: Disney's MBA-led strategy teams couldn't quantify the value of community, and the platform was eventually shut down despite fierce internal opposition. But the emotional legacy Chris describes — kids who found belonging and identity on Club Penguin that they couldn't find at school — is a reminder of what's genuinely at stake when these platforms get it right.