Sesame Street’s Success and its One Billion Views on YouTube

[youtube width=”525″ height=”444″]http://youtu.be/0sEUdmtyJ3U[/youtube]

Sesame Street’s Success has helped their YouTube channel reach one billion views, which makes Sesame Street the first non-profit organization to reach that mark. To celebrate the occasion there is a new video up with the Count counting the “You”s in YouTube and a One Billion Views playlist with the most popular videos so far. With such displays of success, one cannot help wondering what is it that makes this American children’s show so successful since 1969.

Reasons for Sesame Street’s Success

Sesame Street, created by Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrisett, is an innovative television series which was one of the firsts to combine television and education, targeting children through Muppets, animations, music and humor. Due to its cutting-edge approach, Sesame Street premiered to high ratings, and because of the show’s ability to renew itself through the years while still keeping its essence intact, the success has lasted for almost fifty years.
An important part of this renewal is based on the show’s permanent research to properly define Sesame Street’s educational objectives, for which the most important experts in the field are hired. When the show was first aired, the combination of television production and research was borderline “heretical”, as producer Joan Ganz Cooney asserts.
Another reason for its success is the fact that Sesame Street targets every show to capture children’s attention. This approach is due to the Sesame Street team’s firm belief that if they can hold children’s attention, they can educate them. For that same purpose, the show has worked hard to flow with the fast-changing times, replacing the original opening with its urban skyline for an animated and colorful drawing of a preschool more in tune with children’s current expectations.
Sesame Street and its influence on culture have helped shape more than one generation, bringing people all ages together and serving as a common binding background. YouTube’s one billion hits is just another example of how the show has evolved to reach everyone’s home in today’s computer and internet-based society.