Candle Media CEO Kevin Mayer addressed the news that globally popular animated series Cocomelon will be leaving Netflix for Disney+ at the APOS media and entertainment conference in Bali, Indonesia.
In May, The Hollywood Reporter learned that Disney+ had picked up Cocomelon after Netflix declined to renew its license. Starting in 2027, Disney+ will have every season of the hit preschool show that is the crown jewel of Candle’s Moonbug Entertainment unit. At the time, Netflix sources told THR that the streamer chose not to renew its Cocomelon license due to a decline in viewership. The show has been with Netflix since 2020, and despite airing four new seasons in 2024, the preschool series’ viewership declined by nearly 60 percent from 2023 H1 to 2024 H2, according to the streamer’s reports.
On Wednesday, Mayer took part in a fireside chat at APOS with Vivek Couto, executive director of Media Partners Asia, and was directly asked about Cocomelon moving to Disney, a deal that despite Netflix’s claims about viewership declines is still something of a coup for Mayer’s former employer given the strength and ubiquity of the kids-focused brand.
“Well, I wouldn’t read too much into this one shift from Netflix to Disney+ as a broader shift in the ecosystem necessarily,” Mayer said when asked if the deal had implications for the kids content ecosystem. “All the IP from the Moonbug originates on YouTube, and I think it’s a very different model for media companies.”
Mayer explained that YouTube is the “most fertile area to get a professionally produced IP” for companies like Moonbug. “We bought Cocomelon five years ago. It was developed by a South Korean couple in south Los Angeles and it was already a pretty big property, with about 60 million subscribers, and millions of views a month. Now we’ve grown into 200 million subscribers. And in January of this year we had 10 billion views across Cocomelon and the rest of our libraries at Moonbug.”
He added that Cocomelon began strictly as a YouTube property but Candle looked to make it a multiplatform brand. “We take it from YouTube, we put it on Netflix, and then the original Netflix deployment was actually just the YouTube seasons that we had put up on YouTube. We packaged those into one-hour episodes. Since 2021, it was on Netflix, and it’s been the number one show on Netflix globally in aggregate since then.”
Mayer said that Cocomelon had a “great run” on Netflix but Moonbug has looked at many other avenues to capitalize on the popularity of the brand, including producing games, licensing and music for streamers like Spotify. “Last year, across Moonbug, we had more music streams across all platforms than Taylor Swift.”
“Netflix was a great home for [Cocomelon] for a long time, and there are different usage occasions. Some parents are comfortable with YouTube. Some parents are more comfortable with the more curated environment that Netflix represents, and of course Disney is a natural home for kids and family product, Mayer said. “I come from Disney, I spent 25 years there, it’s a natural place for this to migrate to, and I think we want to take our properties and strategically deploy them across all the different streaming platforms — Netflix, Amazon, Disney+ — there are many streaming platforms, many homes for our properties, and we try to take advantage of that.”
Towards the end of the fireside chat, Mayer remembered to break some news, revealing that the Cocomelon brand would be collaborating with Sanrio’s global pop culture phenomenon Hello Kitty. Mayer didn’t offer any specifics or details about the collaboration or what platforms it would appear on, but he did say the partnership would launch in 2026 and that it would be a “joyous moment for kids and teens around the world.”
