Behind The Scenes With YouTube Hit Series Gracie’s Corner

Javoris made a discovery that the educational content for preschool children at that time wasn’t very diverse. A lot of the characters and what we had our children watching did not look like them. He said, “I don’t like that my children are watching something that they can’t see themselves in. We should do something about it.” So, he started doing the research.

The main we were looking at [included] a lot of animals, nursery run channels, nothing specific. They watched a little bit of everything, but a lot of ‘everything’ at that time was falling short. A lot of these properties have gotten a little better, but the one thing we did—that a lot of them still don’t necessarily do—is make the children of color at the forefront with the core character.

We didn’t think it was going to evolve into the business operation [it is] now. When we first started, it was like a labor of love. We weren’t putting out content on a regular cadence. So, we were able to still focus on our primary jobs as university professors. But eventually things kind of took off. And then it was becoming a juggling act, and we had to make a decision—are we going to focus on the university work or focus on this channel? From an impact perspective, we saw how the channel was reaching so many more people than we could ever imagine reaching in a classroom. So [we said] Okay, this is the route.

Feeding the (content) beast

The whole model of something like YouTube—it’s going to have its ups and downs. It depends on the market. It depends on the economy on whether companies are going to be spending money on ads. And so we feel that, but I don’t think we’ve seen anything super dramatic as what those creators saw [in early 2020] who were doing children’s content before they changed all of the ad rules.

People think [being a creator] is easy. It’s a challenge. I call it ‘feeding the beast.’ If you don’t put out videos, the algorithm stops liking you. So, you do have certain expectations for production. You can’t take off two months and not make something—it’s going to be very detrimental to your platform. It’s not easy.

As a creator, especially in the digital space, there’s no true endpoint. The true endpoint is if you sell or some type of merger acquisition. But outside of that, you constantly have to be creative and think of new ideas. And as you create more and more stuff, it becomes more difficult to do it because now you’ve already done X, Y, Z. You have to find new ways to be fresh.

Gracie, you’re a star

The time I knew when we were actually making a difference and that [Gracie’s Corner] was resonating with people was [when we started receiving] text messages from friends and family who lived in different states saying, ‘Oh, I went to this birthday party, and I heard your music.’ And they were sending me videos of families on TikTok dancing. And I think that’s when I knew—okay, this is something bigger than I initially thought it was going to be.