Double vision

In the early days, much of the children's material available on YouTube was broadly educational. But before long, some seriously strange stuff started to appear

- Mark Bergen

Harry Jho worked out of a 10th-storey Wall Street office, in which one corner was stacked with treadmill desks and another was filled with racks of colourful costumes and a green screen for filming nursery rhymes. He worked as a securities lawyer. With his wife, Sona, Jho also ran Mother Goose Club, a YouTube media empire.

Sona had produced short children's segments for public-access TV stations before the couple decided to branch out on their own. As educators - the Jhos once taught English in Korea - they saw television's pedagogical flaws. To learn words, kids should see lips move, but Barney's mouth never did. Baby Einstein mostly showed toys. The Jhos, who were Korean American, had two young children, and noticed how few faces on kids' TV looked like theirs.

So they started Mother Goose Club, investing in a studio and hiring actors to don animal costumes and sing Incy Wincy Spider and Hickory Dickory Dock. It was like Teletubbies, only less trippy and inane. The Jhos planned to sell DVDs to parents, stirring up interest for a possible TV show. YouTube offered a convenient place to store clips, and, in 2008, Jho started an account there, not thinking much of it.

Two years in, he started checking the account's numbers after work. One thousand views. He checked the next day. Ten thousand. He couldn't find many other videos for kids on YouTube. Maybe, instead of television, he thought, we can be the first to do this.