How This 6-Year-Old Made $11 Million In a Year
Ready to wish you had thought to set your camera up while your kid just ... played with toys?
According to Forbes' list of highest-paid YouTube celebrities, 6-year-old Ryan - the star of Ryan ToysReview - raked in an estimated $11 million between June 1, 2016 and June 1, 2017, and received a whopping 8 billion views during that time period.
More than 10 million people subscribe to the channel, which mostly features videos of Ryan playing with toys, like this:
This video in particular, of Ryan opening more than 100 car toys, is super popular, with over 802 million views.
In a 2015 interview with TubeFilter, Ryan's parents explained that Ryan ToysReview was created after Ryan became obsessed with unboxing videos and asked his parents to put him on YouTube too. The channel blew up in 2015, when Ryan was 4 years old. His mother, a former teacher, told the website she had left her job at a high school to run it full-time. Before starting Ryan's reviews, she said she had never posted a video to YouTube.
The accidental business only seems to be growing. According to Variety, the family solidified a development deal with children's media company Pocket.watch in September. Yet aside from the addition of some animated shorts, not much on the channel seems to have changed. One recent video shows just over 26 minutes of footage of Ryan playing with a Thomas and Friends train set. In a day, it racked up over half a million views.
Though Ryan's mom manages to post a new video every day, last year she told The Verge that she and his father primarily film on the weekends, and usually just a couple of videos at a time, so as not to interfere with Ryan's school schedule. She also assured readers that Ryan ToysReview will only last as long as its star wants it to: "As long as he’s loving it and it doesn’t disrupt his daily routine, we plan on continuing. But the moment he’s not having fun any more, that’s when it will be time to stop.”
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