How kids coped with COVID-hit winter holidays

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Due to the pandemic situation in late 2020, street festivities got canceled worldwide. For many families, get-togethers with grandparents over the Christmas period were also put on hold. As a result, children across the globe sought holiday fun and games from the comfort of home. And thanks to modern tech and the ubiquitous internet, they had no reason to be bored.

We analyzed and categorized the most popular websites and search queries over the festive period (December 20, 2020 — January 10, 2021) to find out how kids compensated for the lack of outdoor winter entertainment.

How we collect our statistics

Our Kaspersky Safe Kids solution for home users scans the contents of web pages that children try to visit. If the site falls into one of fourteen undesirable categories, the product sends an alert to Kaspersky Security Network. In doing so, no personal data is transmitted and user privacy is not violated. Note:

• It is up to the parent to decide which content to block by tweaking the protective solution’s preferences. However, anonymous statistics are collected for all the 14 categories.
  
• The information in this report was obtained from computers running Windows and macOS; mobile statistics are not presented.
  

Website categorization

Web filtering in Kaspersky Safe Kids currently covers the following categories:

• Online communication (social networks, messengers, chats, forums)
  
• Adult content
  
• Alcohol, tobacco, narcotics
  
• Violence
  
• Weapons, explosives, pyrotechnics
  
• Profanity
  
• Gambling, lotteries, sweepstakes
  
• Video games
  
• Electronic commerce (shops, banks, payment systems)
  
• Software, audio, video
  
• Recruitment
  
• Religions, religious associations
  
• News media
  
• Anonymous access tools
  

Search query filtering

Children’s search activities best illustrate their interests. Kaspersky Safe Kids can filter kids’ queries in five search engines (Bing, Google, Mail.ru, Yahoo!, Yandex), as well as on YouTube. Filtering targets six potentially dangerous topics: Adult content, Alcohol, Narcotics, Tobacco, Racism and Profanity.

We took as the 100% value the Top 1000 search queries collected from the above search engines, plus YouTube, and separately calculated the Top 1000 search queries for this video platform. The ranking was based on the number of times a query was input, without breakdown by region or language. The popularity of a topic is determined by its share of related queries.

We divided the search queries collected from December 20, 2020 to January 10, 2021 into thematic categories:

• YouTube
  
• Games
  
• Translate
  
• Communication
  
• Music
  
• Video platforms
  
• Education
  
• Shopping
  
• Anime
  
• Cartoons
  
• Other topics
  

Because YouTube queries account for nearly 50% of the total, they merit a separate category.

What sites were kids interested in?

Most often, children visited websites with video and audio content (40.36%). This is 2.58 p.p. more than the average for the year (June 2019 — May 2020), while the share of the category amounted to 39.11%. In second place was Online communication (25.8%). The share of visits to the web versions of WhatsApp and Telegram, Facebook, Instagram and other sites in this category also increased against the average indicator for the year (24.16%). Third place went to Video games (16.19%), interest in which also grew slightly: data for the period June 2019 — May 2020 showed 15.98%. But the number of visits to online stores turned out lower than the yearly average: 10.94% versus 11.25% in 2019–2020.
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