03ideaOct 2026

The kids’ cartoon channel your PC animates

Claude writes every Short, and Wan2GP, a free studio that runs open video models on your own graphics card, animates it. The full system with its prompts, checked against YouTube’s made-for-kids rules, the model licences and the Partner Program changes coming in February 2027

A faceless 3D cartoon channel for kids on YouTube Shorts. Claude writes each Short and its scene prompts, and Wan2GP animates them on your own graphics card, so there are no credits and no fee per clip. This is the whole system: the niche, the install, the models, a character sheet, a week of scripts, a way to learn from the biggest channels and a weekly schedule. It is also checked against the tools’ own pages, YouTube and the FTC, and several things change. Kids’ videos earn less per view and face extra quality rules. The Flux model the guide suggests and CapCut’s music aren’t licensed for a paid channel. Kling’s free daily credits now go to subscribers only. And from February 2027, a new channel needs twice the views to join the Partner Program.

YouTube ShortsWan2GPKids contentLocal videoClaudeWan2GP ↗Pinokio ↗LTX-2.5 ↗Wan 2.2 (5B) ↗Qwen-Image ↗Made for kids ↗Quality principles for kids’ content ↗YouTube monetization policies ↗Partner Program rules ↗Partner Program changes, 2027 ↗Shorts revenue sharing ↗FTC COPPA FAQ ↗

The whole system

Kids’ 3D cartoons are one of the biggest things on YouTube. One nursery-rhyme Short has 5.4 billion views, on a channel with 29.5 million subscribers. A channel like that used to need a studio of animators, and the AI shortcut needed a paid video tool that burns credits on every clip. This system skips both. Claude writes the stories and the scene prompts, and the video model runs on your own computer, so there is no fee per clip and no cap on how many you make. Shorts pay per view from a shared ad pool, so the money comes from volume: many Shorts, the same lovable characters, posted every day.

Checked, not copied

What held up, on 1 October 2026

Checked against the Wan2GP repository and its docs, Pinokio, Lightricks, Wan-AI, Qwen, Black Forest Labs, Kling, CapCut, YouTube’s help center and the FTC.

ClaimWhat the primary source says

5.4 billion views, 29.5 million subscribersCorrect. The Short is a counting song from NuNu Tv Nursery Rhymes, at 5,479,776,145 views on 1 October 2026, and the channel shows 29.5 million subscribers. Neither page says whether AI was involved. A public Shorts count includes every time a Short starts to play; the Partner Program counts engaged views.

A free, open-source studio with about 10,000 starsFree, yes: the project says it “will never ask you to pay a license fee, subscription, or donation to run WanGP on your own computer”. Open source, not quite. Its WanGP Community License 2.0 bars selling it or offering paid hosted access, so source-available is the accurate term. It had 9,723 stars on 1 October 2026.

6 GB for the lighter models, 12 GB for LTX-2.5Not documented. Wan2GP says it runs “select models with as little as 6 GB of VRAM”, and its guide ties that figure to the older Wan 2.1 1.3B. It gives no figure for LTX-2.5 or Wan 2.2 5B, and calls fixed memory tiers unreliable. Lightricks’ own code asks for 32 GB or more for LTX-2.5; the last figures Wan2GP published were for the older LTX-2, which made ten seconds of 720p on 8 GB. GTX 10-series cards work too, not only RTX.

About 100 GB of diskNot stated by Wan2GP, but a fair allowance. LTX-2.5’s 8-bit files alone come to about 32 GB, a 19.5 GB model plus a 12.9 GB text encoder, and Lightricks recommends 100 GB of storage for its own setup.

Free daily credits on KlingOut of date. Kling’s daily credits now go to subscribers; free accounts get a monthly allowance whose size Kling doesn’t publish. Free videos carry a watermark, and Kling’s terms forbid commercial use of the output without a membership. The cheapest plan with commercial rights, Standard, costs $6.99 for the first month and then $8.80, for 660 credits. A five-second 720p clip on Kling 3.0 costs 30, so that is 22 clips, under four 30-second Shorts a month.

Flux or Qwen Image for the charactersOnly one of them, as worded. FLUX.1 [dev] is licensed for non-commercial use only, and Black Forest Labs counts revenue-generating activity as commercial. Qwen-Image is Apache 2.0, free for commercial use, and so are FLUX.1 [schnell] and FLUX.2 [klein] 4B. The newest Qwen-Image-2.1 is licensed for research only.

CapCut (free) to add the songFree for this: CapCut says a video you edit by hand exports without a watermark, while 4K and its AI features need Pro. Add your own song, though, not CapCut’s music. Its ordinary sounds are licensed for personal, non-commercial use, and its commercial sounds only inside CapCut and TikTok. YouTube’s Audio Library is cleared for monetized videos.

Made for kids is the law, and YouTube checksCorrect. YouTube requires the setting wherever you live, under its agreement with the FTC, and uses machine learning to spot kids’ videos and override wrong settings. COPPA applies to a kids’ channel as it would to a website. The FTC’s maximum penalty is now $53,088 per violation, Disney settled for $10 million in 2025 over videos it had marked not made for kids, and channels outside the US are covered when they target American children.

The Partner Program thresholdsCorrect until 31 January 2027: 1,000 subscribers with 10 million Shorts views in 90 days, or with 4,000 watch hours in 12 months. From 1 February 2027, new applicants need 20 million Shorts views in 90 days or 8,000 watch hours in 365 days, and Shorts earn a share of the pool only in months when the channel has had 10 million Shorts views over the previous 90 days.

20 Shorts make a 30–60 minute compilationThe arithmetic doesn’t work. Twenty 30-second Shorts make 10 minutes. That still clears the 8 minutes a monetized video needs for mid-roll ads, but 30 to 60 minutes takes 60 to 120 Shorts.

Kids’ videos are held to a stricter bar

On top of its usual rules, YouTube judges made-for-kids videos against six low-quality principles: heavily promotional, encouraging negative behaviours or attitudes, deceptively educational, hard to follow, sensational or misleading, and strange use of children’s characters. A video that fails them can earn little or nothing, and a channel with a strong focus on low-quality kids’ content can be suspended from the Partner Program. YouTube names mass production and autogeneration as the usual cause of hard-to-follow videos, which is exactly the risk of an AI pipeline.

The same rules point the other way too. High-quality kids’ content gets raised up in recommendations, and YouTube’s monetization policy names “using AI to visualize a unique character and narrative you invented” as allowed. That is the line this system has to stay on: your own characters, and a real little story in every Short.

Don’t plan on the YouTube Kids app, though. Made-for-kids videos aren’t added to it automatically, and in April 2026 YouTube told the Associated Press that it limits AI-generated content there to a small set of high-quality channels.

Start here

What you need

✓A Windows or Linux PC with a graphics card. Wan2GP runs select models on 6 GB of video memory and supports NVIDIA cards back to the GTX 10 series; more memory runs the bigger models. In the guide’s experience, a gaming laptop from the last few years usually qualifies✓AMD cards work on Windows, from RDNA 2 to RDNA 4, though the AMD guide warns its Windows packages are new and may be unstable. Macs have had early support since May 2026: slow, and not every model runs✓At least 16 GB of system RAM, the minimum the Pinokio installer asks for✓About 100 GB of free disk space for the app and the models✓Claude to write the stories and prompts. The free plan works to start✓No graphics card? The guide suggests Kling’s free daily credits, but those now go to subscribers. A free account still gets monthly credits to test the idea, with a watermark and no right to use the videos commercially

How to check your card

On Windows, press Ctrl + Shift + Esc, open the Performance tab and click GPU. The name and the Dedicated GPU memory number are what you need. On Linux with an NVIDIA card, run nvidia-smi in a terminal.

Step 1

Pick the niche

Stay in one lane so the algorithm knows who to show you to. The three that work best with this system:

01·Replays

Nursery rhymes and learning songs

A baby and animal friends, counting, colours, the alphabet. Kids replay these endlessly.

02·No words

Animal adventures

Short funny stories with a koala, a puppy or a dinosaur. No words needed, so they work in every country.

03·Every night

Bedtime stories

Calm, slow, cosy. Parents play them every night, which means steady daily views.

The move most people miss

Make two or three characters and keep them forever. Kids come back for the characters, not the topic: same baby, same bunny, same colours in every Short. What has to change each time is the story. YouTube won’t monetize “videos where characters are put in the same situation over and over again with the same outcome”.

Step 2

Install the free video studio (Wan2GP)

Wan2GP is a free app with nearly 10,000 stars on GitHub. It puts the best open video models in one place, including LTX-2.5, which makes video with sound, and Wan 2.2, plus free image, music and voice models. It runs in your browser, but the studio is served from your own computer and every clip is made on your graphics card. The project states it will never ask you to pay to run it locally.

It still needs the internet to download each model the first time. Its optional remote engines, for the Deepy assistant and the prompt enhancer, send prompts, images and frames over the internet, so leave them off to keep everything local. Download Wan2GP only from the official GitHub repository or its wan2gp.ai and wangp.ai sites, as the project itself warns.

Easiest way: Pinokio (no typing)

1

Install Pinokio

Download it free from pinokio.co and install it like any app. The old pinokio.computer address redirects there, and Pinokio is open source under the MIT licence.

2

Find Wan2GP

Open Pinokio’s app catalogue, which the guide calls Discover and Pinokio now calls explore, and search for wan2gp. Three results are titled Wan2GP. Pick the community script by @morpheus, which Wan2GP’s own README recommends over the official Pinokio install, or wan2gp-amd for AMD cards.

3

Install and start

Click Install and let it download everything; the first time takes a while. Then click Start and the studio opens in your browser.

Alternative: the one-click script

Written for Windows. On Linux, run the matching .sh files in a terminal.

1

Download the project

Install Git from git-scm.com, open a terminal and run the two lines below.

2

Run the installer

Double-click scripts\install.bat and choose 1, Automatic Install (1-Click). It sets up everything for your card, and offers to install Python 3.11 if it’s missing.

3

Start the studio

Double-click scripts\run.bat. Open the address it prints in your browser, normally http://localhost:7860.

terminal2 lines

git clone https://github.com/deepbeepmeep/Wan2GP.git
cd Wan2GP

Step 3

Choose your model

Pick the model from the drop-down menu in the studio. The first time you use one, it downloads automatically in a version suited to your card. New to it? Wan2GP’s Guides tab lists recommended models.

ModelThe guideWhat to know

LTX-2.5The guideThe best free model right now. It makes video and sound together, so the giggles and music come with the clip. Use it if your card has 12 GB or more.What to knowNo published memory figure in Wan2GP, so try one short clip first. Free for any business under $10 million a year in revenue.

Wan 2.2 (5B)The guideThe lightest good model, for 6 to 8 GB cards. It makes silent clips, so add music afterwards.What to knowComfyUI says it fits on 8 GB with offloading. Ask for 720p or more: Wan2GP warns it “will remind you of Wan 1.0” below that. Apache 2.0.

Music and TTSThe guideAlso inside Wan2GP. Use them to make the sing-along songs and voices for free.What to knowAce Step makes the songs and Qwen3 TTS the voices, among others. AI-generated music has to be disclosed when you upload.

Step 4

Design your characters once

Make a character sheet with a free image model inside Wan2GP. You will feed these images into every video, so the characters look the same every time. Ask Claude to write the image prompt, or use this one.

character-sheet.txt5 lines

Character sheet for a kids' 3D cartoon channel, Pixar-style look.
A 2-year-old baby boy with fluffy orange hair and a teal t-shirt with a yellow star,
a fluffy pastel-blue bunny with long ears, and a yellow baby elephant.
Front view and side view of each, happy and surprised faces, plain white background.
Bright, soft, friendly, big expressive eyes.

Use an image model you can earn with

The guide says Flux or Qwen Image. FLUX.1 [dev] is licensed for non-commercial use only, and Black Forest Labs counts any revenue-generating activity as commercial, which a monetized channel is. Qwen-Image and its 2512 and Edit versions are Apache 2.0 and free for commercial use, as are FLUX.1 [schnell] and FLUX.2 [klein] 4B. Skip the newest Qwen-Image-2.1, which is licensed for research only.

One more reason to make the characters properly yours. In the US, AI output gets copyright protection only where a person decided enough of its expressive elements, “but not the mere provision of prompts”, says the Copyright Office. Characters you refine by hand stand on firmer ground than a sheet straight from one prompt.

Step 5

Let Claude write a week of Shorts

This is the guide’s prompt. One message gives you ten ready-to-make Shorts, with the video prompts already written for the free model.

Running Wan 2.2 instead? Swap LTX-2.5 for Wan 2.2 in point 3 and leave out the sound, since Wan 2.2 makes silent clips.

week-of-shorts.txt12 lines

Write 10 YouTube Shorts for a kids' 3D cartoon channel.
Each one is 30 seconds: a baby and animal friends,
bright colours, one simple lesson (counting, colours,
sharing), a catchy repeated line kids sing along to.

For every Short give me:
1. A 3-second hook scene
2. The scene-by-scene shot list (5-second scenes)
3. One LTX-2.5 video prompt per scene: describe the characters,
  the action, the camera move, the sound, and the final frame
4. The lyrics of the sing-along line
5. A title and thumbnail idea

Why the hook scene matters

In the guide’s words, Shorts are judged in the first second. Open on motion and a face: the baby zooming down a slide, the bunny bursting out of a ball pit. Never a slow title card.

Step 6

Make the Short

1

Pick image to video

In Wan2GP choose LTX-2.5 or Wan 2.2 and start from an image, then upload the character image that fits the scene. This is what keeps the characters consistent. In LTX-2.5 it is the Start with Image option. Wan 2.2 5B takes an image as well as text, and there is a larger image-to-video model too.

2

Paste Claude’s scene prompt

One prompt per scene. Set a vertical 9:16 size, such as 720 × 1280, and about five seconds per scene.

3

Queue the whole Short

Add every scene to the generation queue and let it run. Each clip takes a few minutes, so queue a full batch and come back later, or leave it running overnight.

4

Redo the weak scenes

Not happy with one? Change a detail in the prompt, like making the bunny jump higher, and run only that scene again. It costs nothing but time.

How long a clip takes depends on the model and the card. The only official benchmark is Wan-AI’s, for Wan 2.2 5B with its own reference code: about nine minutes for one 720p clip on an RTX 4090. Wan2GP is tuned to need less memory, and its changelog reports much faster distilled versions. Ten Shorts of six scenes come to about 60 clips a week, so time a single clip on your own card before you plan the week around it.

Be patient with the first run

The first launch downloads the models, which runs to tens of gigabytes for LTX-2.5. After that each model is on your disk, the clips are made on your own machine, and every video is free.

Step 7

Copy what already wins

The fastest way to find ideas that work: look at what already gets millions of views and make your own version with your characters.

1

Find a winning channel

Search YouTube for nursery rhymes or kids cartoon, open a big channel, click Shorts, then Popular.

2

Screenshot the top Shorts

Grab the page showing the best ones and their view counts.

3

Paste it into Claude with this prompt

Claude studies the patterns and writes original versions with your characters.

copy-what-wins.txt5 lines

Here is a screenshot of the most popular Shorts on a big kids' channel.
Find the patterns: topics, hooks, colours, length, what the characters do.
Then write 5 ORIGINAL Shorts in the same spirit using MY characters,
with new stories and new songs. Do not copy their characters, titles or lyrics.
Give me the LTX-2.5 prompt for each scene.

Make it yours

Take the pattern, never the content. Reuploading or closely copying another channel’s videos gets you demonetized and can get the channel removed.

Step 8

Finish and upload

1

Stitch the scenes

Drop the clips into CapCut, add the song and trim any slow first second. Use the song you made in Wan2GP or a track from YouTube’s Audio Library, not CapCut’s music, which isn’t licensed for a monetized channel.

2

Title

Short and searchable: the song or lesson plus the characters. Example: Baby Learns Colours with Bunny | Nursery Rhymes.

3

Set Made for kids

In YouTube Studio, mark every video as made for kids. YouTube requires it for content aimed at children, under 13 in the US, through its agreement with the FTC; COPPA is the law behind it, and YouTube’s systems check and can override your choice. The setting also turns off comments, end screens, the notification bell, the miniplayer, save to playlist and personalized ads.

4

Tick AI use for AI songs

Not in the guide. If the song was made with AI, answer yes to AI use under Attributes when you upload: YouTube’s must-disclose list includes AI-generated music. Cartoon visuals alone don’t need it, and disclosing doesn’t limit reach or earnings.

5

Schedule

Post one to three Shorts a day at the same times. Consistency beats bursts.

6

Build compilations

Every two weeks, stitch your best Shorts into one long video. Long videos earn more per view, and parents leave them playing. The guide says 20 Shorts make 30 to 60 minutes; twenty 30-second Shorts make 10, which is still past the 8 minutes needed for mid-roll ads. Thirty minutes takes about 60.

The money

How the money works

The guide’s points, checked against YouTube’s Partner Program pages. YouTube publishes no per-view rates; your own show up in YouTube Studio once the channel is monetized.

The guide saysWhat holds

Join the Partner ProgramRight until 31 January 2027: 1,000 subscribers with 10 million Shorts views in 90 days, or with 4,000 watch hours in 12 months, and views in the Shorts feed don’t count toward the hours. From 1 February 2027, new applicants need 20 million Shorts views in 90 days or 8,000 watch hours in 365 days.

Shorts pay from a shared poolRight. YouTube pools the ad money from the Shorts feed, splits it by each channel’s share of views, and you keep 45% of your share. From 1 February 2027 you get a share only in months when the channel has had 10 million Shorts views over the previous 90 days. Below that you stay in the program and keep earning on long videos.

Long videos pay more per viewOn long videos you keep 55% of the ad revenue from your own watch pages, and from 8 minutes they can carry mid-roll ads. That is why compilations matter: the Shorts bring the audience, the long videos turn it into money.

Made for kids lowers pay per viewRight. YouTube serves no personalized ads on kids’ content and says this “may result in a decrease in revenue for some creators”, without giving a figure. Contextual ads still run, minus some categories such as food and drink. The kids niche wins on sheer views and replays.

Or point it at adultsThe guide’s idea for higher pay per view: the same system making animated finance or business stories. YouTube won’t monetize AI personas that give financial advice as if they were human experts, so explain rather than advise.

Your cost stays at zeroNo credits means volume costs only time and electricity, which is exactly what this model rewards. The real outlay is the PC.

Every week

Your weekly schedule

1

Monday

Claude writes 10 Shorts (step 5). 15 minutes.

2

Monday night

Queue all the scenes in Wan2GP and let your PC work while you sleep.

3

Tuesday

Redo any weak scenes, then stitch and title the Shorts in CapCut.

4

Wednesday

Schedule the whole week in YouTube Studio.

5

Friday

Check which Shorts got the most views, and tell Claude to write the next 10 in that direction.

6

Every other week

Build one long compilation from your best Shorts.

Staying paid

Stay on the right side of YouTube

YouTube does not pay for mass-produced, repetitive videos that all look the same. Give every Short a real little story, a new song or lesson, and your own characters. Never use Disney, Pixar or any famous characters, and never reupload anyone else’s videos.

What YouTube won’t pay for

From YouTube’s channel monetization policies, its quality principles for kids’ content and its AI disclosure rules. Each is a way an AI cartoon channel can fail.

✗“AI-generated content made with generic or unoriginal templates giving the impression of mass production without adding the creator’s original, authentic insights or perspective”✗“Videos where characters are put in the same situation over and over again with the same outcome”✗Kids’ videos that are heavily promotional, encourage negative behaviours or attitudes, or are deceptively educational✗Kids’ videos that are hard to follow, which YouTube says “is often the result of mass production or autogeneration”✗Kids’ videos that are sensational or misleading, or make strange use of children’s characters✗Reuploads of other people’s videos, and famous characters such as Disney’s or Pixar’s✗AI music left undisclosed: doing it repeatedly can get videos removed or the channel suspended from the Partner Program

What decides whether it pays

The free studio solves production: no credits, no fee per clip, as many Shorts as your card can render overnight. Whether the channel earns is decided elsewhere. It has to reach a Partner Program threshold that doubles for new channels in February 2027, it earns less per view because its audience is children, and every Short has to clear YouTube’s quality bar for kids’ content and its rule against mass production. Your own characters, with a real little story in every Short, are what carry it over that bar.

← previous

Claude researches, Jev decides, you approve

next →

Seven jobs for a model that only decides

← all experiments