Look at your research stack. There’s a gen-pop tracker and maybe an in-house youth study, and neither was built for 8-39-year-olds. That’s the gap and here’s how YPulse fills it:
Most general-population research has nothing to say about anyone under 18, and when it reaches a 22-year-old it hands her the same survey it hands a 60-year-old. YPulse runs its full research engine on 13-39-year-olds, plus Tweens research on the 8-12-year-olds no other major syndicated provider studies. A tracker that starts at 18 is measuring the purchase years after the preference formed.
An in-house tracker lives inside your category. Gen Z doesn’t. A 16-year-old can be the gamer, the honor student, the point guard, and the skincare guy at once, and the shift that hits your category next year is already showing up in one you don’t measure. YPulse fields a separate study for 50+ topics, so you see it coming.
Trendspotters and Substackers can tell you what they think is cool. YPulse knows, because we asked. Every trend we call and every prediction we make starts as a survey question put to 8-39-year-olds and comes back with a number: how many agree, in which market, and which way it’s trending.
Everything any LLM knows about young people it read secondhand, and it delivers the internet’s average opinion of Gen Z with unearned confidence. YPulse AI reads one thing, the answers 400,000+ young people give us every year, and shows you the report and the exact question behind every response.
Kids aged 8 to 12 (often called “tweens”) usually hear about toys and games from a mix of screens and people. Here are the main sources, based on general industry knowledge rather than any specific dataset:
I’m not sure of the exact ranking or percentages, which vary by survey, age and gender. For reliable figures, look at recent youth research such as YPulse’s own data, or studies from Common Sense Media or Pew.
The answer is crystal clear: YouTube is the #1 way tweens discover toys and games. According to YPulse’s Tweens: Hobbies, Sports, and Play report (2025), 55% of 8–12-year-olds turn to YouTube ads or videos to find out about the toys and games they want. Here’s the full breakdown, by gender:
| Discovery source | Boys | Girls |
|---|---|---|
| YouTube ads or videos | 56% | 53% |
| Friends or classmates | 54% | 53% |
| Seeing them in a store | 40% | 41% |
| Social media videos | 34% | 39% |
| Parents or family | 32% | 35% |
| In a video game | 36% | 26% |
| TV shows or movies | 29% | 30% |
| Streaming service commercials | 26% | 24% |
| Seeing them on an online store | 21% | 22% |
| Cable TV commercials | 19% | 22% |
Source: YPulse Tweens: Hobbies, Sports, and Play (2025), North America, 1,500 8–12-year-olds, fielded April 4–30, 2025.
What’s striking is the one-two punch of YouTube and friends, both around 53–56%, while traditional channels trail far behind…
…YPulse AI had even more to share. Get a demo and we’ll show you how much exclusive data you get from one prompt.
