Australia’s ABC has been taking some heat in the mainstream press from critics saying it missed a trick by not keeping control of the Bluey IP, instead allowing the Aussie hit to benefit the BBC in the UK—but the industry is responding that the reality isn’t so simple. 

It all started with a string of YouTube essays like this one making exaggerated, inaccurate claims that the Bluey IP’s “merchandise alone is worth billions, and Australia makes $0 from it.” (The fact is, royalties and proceeds from sales do come back to Australia, through the franchise’s producer Ludo Studio, according to Jenny Buckland, CEO of the non-profit distributor and funding body Australian Children’s Television Foundation.)

A week after that video came out, ABC’s managing director Hugh Marks reportedly told an audience at Screen Producer Australia’s Screen Forever conference that ABC might have lost out on maybe “$300 million of income that’s going to the UK.”

The quote made headlines and sparked furious discussions on LinkedIn. Voices, largely outside of the kids TV industry, have weighed in with takes on how ABC really messed up. Sue Barrett, founder and CEO of Australian consulting firm Barrett, penned a Substack essay that sums up the criticism leveled at the pubcaster: “The BBC is also a public broadcaster. Yet it had the vision to back a brilliant Australian creation fully, capture its global value, and use that prosperity to fund its public mission. Had the ABC done the same, Bluey’s success could have funded Australian public broadcasting for years. Instead we got minimal risk. The BBC got billions.”

It’s not dissimilar to conversations the industry has seen before, like when mainstream press magnified the idea that Sony lost big on KPop Demon Hunters because it was sold to Netflix—and failed to anticipate the success it was going to have.

Everyone in the industry knows there’s a greater complexity to funding and production than this. But there’s no denying that at the end of the day, kids content as a whole is not being valued as much as it should be. This is true in Australia, where license fees for kids content are generally half of what they are for adult content, despite kids content’s popularity, said ACTF’s Buckland. She wrote an editorial for the Australian Financial Times yesterday that adds industry context to the discussion. “Most children’s shows aren’t financial juggernauts, and broadcasters and streaming platforms don’t want to spend as much on content for the children’s audience as they will for adults,” she wrote, aptly summing up the challenge facing kids producers. 

The crux of the situation is that the Bluey deal is not unusual in the kids business—it just seems that way to industry outsiders. 

The reality of getting a kids show made nowadays is that it basically requires co-productions and deals with multiple broadcasters. Bluey, like all real big kids hits, benefitted from lucky timing. Disney picked it up back in 2019 when the House of Mouse was still acquiring lots of international content for its global channels and Disney+. 

Ludo Studio pitched the series back at Kidscreen’s Asian Animation Summit in 2016, when the industry was very different from what it is today. But what hasn’t changed is that kids content wasn’t getting enough money then, either—ABC offered the show a license fee that covered less than 25% of the production cost, and the producers would have to raise the rest, Buckland wrote. Today, kids content is still not getting enough. 

“Hindsight is always 20/20 when something hits big, but it’s also true that BBC Studios shouldered the risk,” Jo Redfern, founder and CEO of digital-first consultancy Futrhood Media, wrote on LinkedIn. “If it had flopped then the whole burden wouldn’t have been on the ABC and it would have been seen as prudent financial discipline.” 

Australian producer Jonathan Samway also argued on LinkedIn that Bluey needed a partner like the BBC, which has the sort of commercial infrastructure required to turn Bluey into the CP success it is. The broader lesson is that the series still managed to take off thanks to international cooperation even though it didn’t get considerable local support: “So yes, Bluey is a painful Australian lesson. But maybe the failure is not simply that ‘the ABC let it happen’. It’s that Australia created something extraordinary without having the institutional structure to properly hold and scale the value.”

What’s clear to everyone in the industry is that kids content is valuable, and YouTube, broadcasters and streamers—in Australia and beyond—should all be paying more for it. But these platforms should also be doing more to boost kids content. That’s how we get more Blueys instead of just conversations around who left money on the table for what. 

Ben Liebmann, founder of Australian creative agency understory, summed it up: “If we’re going to hold onto the next Bluey, Australia needs a creative industries system funded to match the realities of the modern media market and ecosystem.”