South African kids are using desktop computers to listen to music and watch videos and cartoons on the internet, new data shows.

Almost one third of sites visited and searched for have to do with video-based content.

Searches for porn, or adult content, is the number three type of search.

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South African kids want to listen to music and watch videos and cartoons on the internet from their desktop computers, new data shows.

According to security company Kaspersky’s annual report on kids’ safety, based on anonymised statistics from Kaspersky products with parental control functionality from across the world, SA's kids also search for porn – but much less so than children in most other countries.

Kaspersky looked at which websites kids visit and what they are searching for on the internet from their desktop computers.

See also: A new plan will make it a crime to give a child a cellphone that can access pornography

For the first time, the data showed kids want to spend more time watching YouTube than being on social medial.

It also showed that children are searching for topics relating to video, games, and increasingly porn.

Here are the highlights of the report.

Almost one third of sites visited and searched for have to do with video. Africa leads the way with visiting the most websites in this category.

Children in Africa, more than anywhere else, visit sites linked to video, with favourites being youtube.com, dvdvideosoft.com, dropbox.com, and play.google.com.

The most popular site, as well as the most popular search query among children, is YouTube.

While African kids visits these sites the most, kids in China spend more time than any others watching videos and listening to music. South Africa comes in 5th.

The most common video-related searches in English were for “youtube,” “netflix,” and “amazon prime.” The most searched-for blogger is PewDiePie, while the top cartoon channels are Nickelodeon, Disney, and Cartoon Network. There was also heightened interest in searches for Game of Thrones this year.

Children showed considerable interest for music. Big hitters were streaming service Spotify, singer Ariana Grande, rapper xxxtentacion, performer Marshmello, and singer Billie Eilish.

Kids are shifting to mobile devices for their social media.

The global picture has shifted dramatically over the last few years. On a downward trend are the number of visits from PCs to sites in the online communication category, which fell from a majority of 59.68% to just 27.61% this year.

This could be due to various factors, including the scandals around Facebook over the confidentiality of user data, as well as kids shifting to mobile social networks, such as Instagram, SnapChat, and TikTok.

Regardless of the shift away from computers, Facebook still holds on as the dominant website visited. And South African kids are among the top five groups accessing social media by computer.

Kids are showing increasing interest in e-commerce.

Electronic commerce, it seems, is not just for adults anymore. It is the third most popular category website kids visit with most of them going to Amazon, eBay and Aliexpress. South Africa sits in the middle of this trend with countries like Belarus and Russia at the top end of the curve.

Brands-wise kids are looking for Nike, Adidas, Samsung, Gucci, Vans, Supreme, Zara, and Bershka.

Product-wise, the younger generation showed interest in the iPhone X, iPhone 7, Huawei P20, Samsung S7, Nike and Adidas footwear, and various books.

Kids are not playing online games from their computers – but they’re looking for tips on how to play Fortnite.

Although children visiting gaming sites was low (3%), there is still huge interest in the topic – in particular when it comes to getting in-game advice. Computer game related searches account for 16.93% of all kid searches, making it the second highest in the search’s category.

The kids were mostly looking for tutorials on one game: Fortnite.

Searches for porn, or adult content, made the third highest ‘search’ category of kids.

A worrying shift was an increase in searches for porn and visits to porn sites. Searches for porn, or adult content, was the number three search category of kids. This nearly doubled from last year’s figures from 8.59% to 14.90%.

While there is a large interest in searching porn, PC visits to porn sites accounted for only 2.08% of the total websites visited – less than those playing games online. Still, this figure is almost doubled up from 0.74% last year.

South Africa ranks third from the bottom in this category. The report found children in Japan are the most likely to try to visit (or visit if there is no parental block) porn sites. In second place is Brazil and third place Mexico.

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