The Internet Can Now Satisfy Every Toddler’s Most Compulsive Video Content Needs
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The Internet Can Now Satisfy Every Toddler’s Most Compulsive Video Content Needs

And it turns out what they want is trucks. Lots of trucks. Occasionally dogs, but mostly trucks.

​I'd had a song stuck in my head for weeks. It was poppy and upbeat, not a bad earworm as earworms go, but I couldn't seem to get rid of it. When I picked up my friend one afternoon, I found myself absentmindedly humming it in the car. "Is that Guided by Voices?" she asked.

"No," I said. I didn't want to admit what song it was. I tried to change the subject.

"Come on," she pressed. "What is it? Why are you embarrassed?"

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I passed her my phone and told her to open the browser. It would be first window to pop up, because I had watched it four times before I left the house that day. I had been watching it several times a day, every day, for three months. It was a song about a dump truck.

I discovered this strange alley on the toddler YouTube video map the same way every parent does: one morning at around 6 AM, my resolve to be the kind of parent who never hands his or her kid a screen to watch crumbled, bulldozed by my own exhaustion. I was bleary-eyed, and there were no real garbage trucks or cable repair trucks to be found on the pre-dawn streets to point at and observe. I recalled a fond memory of watching Labyrinth for the eight-hundredth time on my parents' living room floor, and then I searched "truck videos." We'd watch these videos together, both because it lessened my guilt and because I thought being able to identify every single part of a truck crane might be a cool parlor trick at dinner parties (the opportunity hasn't yet presented itself, so I might have to force it).

It wasn't long before I found Twenty Trucks, the channel responsible not only for "Dump Truck," but such rousing hits as "Vacuum Truck" and "Feller Buncher." Later, I would become more specific when I hunted for truck videos—there are vast depths to plumb when you're searching for Internet truck videos, which occupy, apparently, a wildly popular niche. A YouTube search for "garbage truck song" yields more than 54,000 results, and some of them are…well, you know, you might just have to go ahead and call them bad. From a critic's perspective, of course. Others have undeniable homespun charm, like this cheerful tune with 3.9 million views, but it's refreshing and rare when you hit upon anything that stands up to a second, third, or five-thousandth viewing.

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Parents are often the forgotten audience members of toddler-oriented videos, our preferences (and ears, and eyes) dismissed because of the assumption (often correct) that we're just happy that our kids—perhaps flu-stricken, temporarily emotionally inconsolable, or waiting way too long for breadsticks to arrive at a restaurant—have found something calming to watch for three-and-a-half minutes.

The remote-controlled truck video niche (over 320,000 results) is an interesting exercise in scale; one channel, RC Live Action, often pits high-quality toys against the elements, including tiny burning houses. Sometimes a human hand will intrude on the action, and you realize that you'd momentarily forgotten that these machines are toys.

Toddlers are notoriously undiscerning—as a friend and fellow parent recently pointed out on Facebook, three-year-olds are the types to call themselves car connoisseurs and then walk away from a car show extolling the marvelous design of the 2015 Toyota Camry. Some would be happy to watch a montage of Cars stills set to Ukrainian techno music on loop for an entire afternoon. Toddlers are the kinds of consumers who made DisneyCollectorBR last year's top-earning YouTube account, earning the anonymous toy un-boxer an estimated $4.86 million in 2014. Their tastes are completely alien, but they know what they like.

It's enough to make you dig out your kid's dinged-up Lightning McQueen and Mater microgliders, slap on a quick manicure, and start filming for cash—especially when you realize that you've watched enough tedious videos of industrial machinery to rival your peers' most intense Netflix series binges. To actually enjoy one of these videos, to go about your day cheerfully mumbling lyrics like "lots of tiny pebbles, thousands of tiny pebbles" is a rare event, and it makes you wonder how an entire channel devoted to truck music videos came to exist at all.

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Twenty Trucks has about 55,000 subscribers and its most popular video—a six-year-old musical ode to the excavator—has over 25 million views. It wasn't born into the digital world, but began in the meatspace in 2004 when creator Jim Gardner released his first DVD on Amazon, a few independent toy stores and distributors, and through his own website.

Gardner had been inspired to create his own videos when his truck-obsessed twins, Pierce and Kassidy, objected to what was previously available on the market: specifically, they didn't like human characters intruding on what would ideally be trucks-only narratives.

Lacking the budget and time to create a song for each truck, Gardner and his brother Rob—a vocalist, composer and musician—decided to pad the DVD with voiceover narration. Though sales were minimal, a 2007 sequel, "Truck Tunes," followed, and in 2008 three of the music videos were uploaded to YouTube in an effort to boost DVD sales.

"At the time, there was no way to 'monetize' content," Gardner tells me, and the exposure didn't significantly affect his profits. In 2010, the excavator video received a huge boost from an unknown source—over 60,000 views in a day—but still, DVDs weren't moving at an increased rate and the traffic soon returned to its more modest norm (2-3,000 views a day).

The Gardners pressed on, however, uploading more videos, attending a YouTube advertiser summit, and attempting to tackle a broader base with an offshoot series, "Twenty Dogs."

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Dogs: not as popular as trucks.

By 2013, Gardner was not feeling optimistic. Ad revenues had stagnated despite an increase in views, and the general demand for physical DVDs was lessening. "I had hoped that we could continue to release new content," Gardner says, "but, given our sales numbers, this seemed unlikely unless we could figure out a way to generate more revenue."

That's when they signed with the multichannel network Collective Digital, the firm that represents The Annoying Orange. Jim and Rob began releasing a new video every month, and subscribers and ad revenues started, slowly, to climb. Reinvigorated, the brothers returned to their original model of creating a song for each of the twenty trucks featured in the first video, with Jim writing the first draft of the lyrics and passing them off to Rob, who took over composing, recording and producing.

Fan videos began rolling in, and this past November the Truck Tunes 2 DVD was released and the original Twenty Trucks video was retired. The channel has amassed more than 70 million views, and newly-released videos are quicker to make an impact. ("Vacuum Truck," which is particularly catchy, has garnered 4 million views since its February release.) The brothers are planning the future of their business—Truck Tunes 3 is tentatively scheduled for release next fall—but neither Gardner has been able to quit their day jobs just yet.

Twenty Trucks' production is in-house, so production costs are low, but the brothers try to keep their expenses for each video to the equivalent of three to four months' ad revenue—which, Gardner points out, "can fluctuate wildly […] depending on YouTube's mysterious algorithm" for quantifying views.

He hopes that—if he can keep the channel growing at its current rate—the truck proceeds can help send his kids to college (well, as long as they don't go crazy and choose Ivy league schools). "We released Twenty Trucks when they were two," he tells me. "They just turned 13 this weekend. So I have five more years to go."

That could change, of course: the predilections of Gardner's target audience are even more mysterious than YouTube's algorithm. Maybe those funky truck jams will overtake toy unboxing videos in 2015, and with any luck, the Gardner twins will ride to college in diamond-encrusted forklifts.