The days where our most popular entertainers are the people we see on TV and at the movies may not have completely passed yet but smaller screens have started to play a big role too in determining who is a celebrity.
Any parent of a young child knows the power of YouTube Kids to entertain and distract them while you try to get on with chores or while traveling between places. The platform has had its own controversies with inappropriate content getting through filters, but that hasn’t stopped its most popular children’s influencers from thriving, building up huge subscriber numbers and earning millions.
According to the latest research from TopDollar, the most popular YouTuber based in the U.S. is a six-year-old Russian-American named Anastasia Radzinskaya, who has the YouTube handle Like Nastya and an incredible 58.4m subscribers. But around the world there are YouTubers creating kids content and winning huge audiences of youngsters who are happy to sit and consume hours of videos at a time.
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The most popular YouTube channels out there are aimed at young children with their main focus being music, such as India’s ChuChu TV Nursery Rhymes & Kids Songs. Other very popular videos focus on reviewing and playing with toys, like Boram from South Korea, who has nearly 14 million subscribers on her toy channel. Kids also like to watch other children’s lives, it would seem, because Boram’s most popular channel is her vlog, which has an incredible 25m subscribers.
TopDollar’s study also shows that there’s lots of money to be made from getting your content right for a young audience that is happy to watch over and over again. It turns out that Like Nastya’s channel is estimated to earn almost $8m every single month from her subscribers, while PewDiePie makes only $1m from nearly twice as many subscribers!
YouTube may have started out as a place to watch music videos and clips of The Simpsons, but today it’s an entertainment industry all of its own, full of influencers making a living out of reviewing toys, playing video games, eating onion rings and playing pranks on each other.
