Earlier this week, YouTube awarded BBC Studios its Diamond Creator Award for getting to 10 million subscribers with Bluey’s YouTube channel. But BBC Studios Digital Brands—which commissions and curates digital content for a wide portfolio of brands that also includes Hey Duggee and Doctor Who—isn’t wasting any time resting on its laurels. 

Kidscreen spoke to digital SVP Jasmine Dawson, who heads up global digital strategy for BBC Studios, and she revealed that her team has commissioned seven new Bluey series (encompassing more than 80 episodes in total) that will roll out on YouTube this year. “And we’re only just getting started,” she says. Here are some excerpts from that interview.

RT: Congratulations on the Diamond Creator Award! What’s coming up next for Bluey digitally this year? 

JD: I can’t talk about the specifics, but what I can tell you is that we have already commissioned seven new digital original series that will launch this year, which is 80-plus new episodes for YouTube. And we’re only just getting started.

We’ve had a phenomenal first series of Bluey Book Reads [featuring A-list celebrities reading Bluey storybooks], which won a Kidscreen Award last month. That series has amassed more than 75 million views. We’re so excited for the next season, and we feel this is something that we can build on. We really focused on A-list celebrities in the first Book Reads, and we’ve started experimenting with international talent and thinking about how we make this fully global and find the right balance of creator talent and A-list talent. Outside of Bluey, brands such as Dr Who and BBC Earth have a huge creator- and talent-facing strategy, and we’d like to try and bring that more into Bluey as we go further into 2025.

We’re really, really proud of a couple of series coming up that are focused on food. I’ve been looking at the content over the last few weeks, and it’s just so heartwarming and really taps into the brand’s ethos, the magic that Bluey brings, which is learning through play. And preparing for meal times and thinking about how a child and the whole family can get involved—there’s something really magical about that. 

RT: You mentioned meal times, and I know that BBC Studios explored Bluey meal kits in the consumer products space for the first time last year. Is that a trend or strategy that digital is trying to tap into as well? 

JD: I work very closely with Suzy Lee Raia, who runs consumer products globally, and those are the things that we talk about. Bluey is a co-watching experience. Parents enjoy it just as much as children. And there are a lot of meal times in the show, where they’re all sitting down as a family. That is something that parents struggle with, and [the question becomes], how can we support them?

YouTube channels that reach 10 million subscribers get The Diamond Creator Award. Image courtesy of BBC Studios.

RT: When it comes to Bluey’s Diamond Creator Award—which is the second one for BBC Studios, if I’m not mistaken—can you tell me what it means for the team to get this sort of recognition? 

JD: It is the second—the first was for BBC Earth—and we’re hoping for our third this year as well, which is really exciting. I’m so immensely proud of the team and the work they’ve done, because I think it definitely is recognition of the fact that we know how to build these amazing fandoms that scale in terms of reach and subscribers. They are such important metrics, but what we are mostly focused on is really building passionate, engaged communities. 

And we’re so lucky to have something like Bluey, because it does that. It speaks to all different age ranges. Obviously, it was born as a preschool program and brand, but it’s been an absolute rocket ship over its very short life cycle, and it’s something that can unite so many age ranges. That’s a real feat when you think about the program, but also quite difficult for my team, because you have to be so thoughtful about how you cater to an age range that spans from the very young to their grandparents.

And therefore, the question becomes: How are we thinking about what our TikTok strategy is, versus our Instagram strategy, versus our YouTube strategy? 

RT: So what does that kind of multi-generational strategy look like? 

JD: BBC Earth has similar challenges. It’s got amazing content that spans all sorts of age ranges, and therefore we’ve had to be so thoughtful about curating that pipeline. We learned so much with BBC Earth and applied that approach of speaking to multiple audience ranges with Bluey, which has really impacted our commissioning pipeline. 

For TikTok, it’s short creator-led videos, whereas YouTube is for a lean-back-and-relax experience. YouTube is also probably being watched on connected TVs, and therefore we lean into compilations that inspire that big-screen experience.

And we’re also thinking about how we tease out the themes that can be meaningful to all age ranges. So music, dance, play. Those are things that are uniting, and that can be meaningful to a parent, a teenager, and especially to children. 

RT: It seems like your team has been doing more commissions recently. Is that true or has it just been happening more quietly?

 JD:  We’ve been doing this for probably about three years. However, what I would say is that it was previously more under the radar because it was test-and-learn to start with. We have started expanding—and particularly on Bluey, obviously—because of the fandom and the understanding that our audiences have such an appetite for this content. 

In terms of the spend we’re looking at for original digital series, that has tripled over the last couple of years, which allows us to do so much more. But the reason we’ve been able to do that is because we can prove that it’s profitable, and we can then reinvest that money back into content.

RT: That’s exciting. What do you think the future holds for your team and Bluey? 

JD: We are being incredibly thoughtful as to what we can give Bluey’s fandom, not just in terms of content, but in terms of experiences as well. And by that I mean experiences on digital—whether it’s a subscription or membership—but also curated consumer product drops through social e-commerce. 

There’s also going to be a lot more channel launches over the next year. We’re thinking about which characters can generate new YouTube channels in their own right. So we’ve got Bingo, she’s got her own channel, and we’ve got Bluey’s Bestest Friends. But Bluey has an eclectic and diverse set of friends, so we’re really diving into that. 

RT: Is there anything else Bluey-related that we haven’t touched on? 

The other thing, and this news was released sort of recently, is the [Bluey] movie. We’re all incredibly excited, and I think this is going to be a way for us to start supercharging our digital content pipeline. We’re asking: What can we do in the run up to the movie? And there are going to be some really exciting things coming.