Moonbug Entertainment has partnered with London-based Caterpillar Captions to adopt the company’s unique brand of captions in a bid to make its content more engaging for preschoolers and help them learn to read. 

Three shows featured on the popular YouTube channel Moonbug Literacy—Read Along with Captions (12 million subscribers) will be augmented with Caterpillar’s on-screen text elements sometime this year. All targeting four- to eight-year-olds, these guinea pigs are CoComelon, Blippi and Little Angel. 

Moonbug has had traditional captions on its Read Along channel since it launched in 2020, but Caterpillar Captions are designed to make it even easier for kids to follow along with what’s being said on screen. They use a font and stylesheet that’s approved by accessibility experts, academics and designers. And compared to YouTube’s typical white letters in a black box, Caterpillar’s captions are rendered in a more child-friendly type style inside a light yellow box so there’s better spacing and difference between the letters.  

Example of Caterpillar’s captions. Research shows that kids read best what they read most, and that’s dark text on light backgrounds, says Warren.

Most parents (85%) say they’d choose a channel with Caterpillar Captions over one without, and 95% of kids read better with its captions compared to regular ones, according to the company’s international research. 

Caterpillar is focused on setting up partnerships with big-brand YouTube channel owners (think Transformers and My Little Pony) and broadcasters. It has two basic models: Caterpillar can license its tech and caption system to a content partner, or it can take a partner’s YouTube content and create a channel with captioned content, generating revenue for the IP owner, says co-founder Henry Warren. 

“I need to get in front of two different people—the channel owners and the broadcasters who want to get their brands behind this pro-social content that negates concerns around screentime,” says Warren. 

The deal with Moonbug marks Caterpillar’s first partnership with a media company, representing a major step in its goal of helping one billion kids learn to read by 2027. It’s an ambitious target, but an important one, given that nearly one-third of British kids struggle with reading proficiency and more than half of eight- to 18-year-olds in the region don’t enjoy reading in their free time. 

Warren has a strong background in education and tech, having worked in the educational/publishing space as an innovation director at educational publisher Pearson. During the pandemic, when his three kids were watching lots of TV, he dug into research about captions and found an overwhelming amount of data showing that they’re beneficial to kids. But there’s a disconnect because most broadcasters and channel owners don’t currently provide the style of captions that kids can easily access. Warren tells Kidscreen Caterpillar Caotions are in negotions with streamers and broadcasters around the world.