The Boy King of YouTube (nytimes.com) 74
"Until recently," writes the NY Times' Jay Caspian Kang, "my daughter and I were somehow able to avoid the king of toy videos: Ryan Kaji."
There's no one way to describe what Kaji, who is now 10 years old, has done across his multiple YouTube channels, cable television shows and live appearances: In one video, he is giving you a tour of the Legoland Hotel; in another, he splashes around in his pool to introduce a science video about tsunamis. But for years, what he has mostly done is play with toys: Thomas the Tank Engine, "Paw Patrol" figures, McDonald's play kitchens. A new toy and a new video for almost every day of the week, adding up to an avalanche of content that can overwhelm your child's brain, click after click. Kaji has been playing with toys on camera since Barack Obama was in the White House.
Here are a few of the companies that are now paying him handsomely for his services: Amazon, Walmart, Nickelodeon, Skechers. Ryan also has 10 separate YouTube channels, which together make up "Ryan's World" [31.2M subscribers], a content behemoth whose branded merchandise took in more than $250 million last year. Even conservative estimates suggest that the Kaji family take exceeds $25 million annually.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the article — and for summarizing one of its most startling details. "Not too surprisingly, Ryan's mother and father paused their teaching and engineering careers to focus on Ryan's empire after seeing the reaction to Ryan's breakout 2016 video, which now has 2+ billion YouTube views."
The Times' reporter quips that the videos capture glimpses from "the only world in which children do not stare at screens" — then wonders if that's even true, sharing their observation from the filming of a special toy-themed TV show with Ryan.
"I overheard a crew member say to him, 'If you finish this scene, you can play Minecraft.' "
Here are a few of the companies that are now paying him handsomely for his services: Amazon, Walmart, Nickelodeon, Skechers. Ryan also has 10 separate YouTube channels, which together make up "Ryan's World" [31.2M subscribers], a content behemoth whose branded merchandise took in more than $250 million last year. Even conservative estimates suggest that the Kaji family take exceeds $25 million annually.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the article — and for summarizing one of its most startling details. "Not too surprisingly, Ryan's mother and father paused their teaching and engineering careers to focus on Ryan's empire after seeing the reaction to Ryan's breakout 2016 video, which now has 2+ billion YouTube views."
The Times' reporter quips that the videos capture glimpses from "the only world in which children do not stare at screens" — then wonders if that's even true, sharing their observation from the filming of a special toy-themed TV show with Ryan.
"I overheard a crew member say to him, 'If you finish this scene, you can play Minecraft.' "
had it not been for the pandemic... (Score:4, Insightful)
...my son would never have seen this garbage as his daycare closed down and transitioned into being a tablet sadly
--> The primary lesson I learned from this is that if you give your child a tablet, I strongly advise some cheapo amazon tablet in a rubber case without any real wifi access but just use the app "video for android" and load up all sorts of pre-approved youtube videos from PBS (or just the pbs app with wifi enabled) so he can avoid the youtube garbage
my son was 3 when this started and is now 5 and has thankfully, largely moved past ryan onto, well, ninja kidz (sp?) which is, perhaps, better?
that said, he still asks me to buy him a "golden console" on a regular basis... (which you can, of course, purchase on amazon - which my wife did but it is little more than a fancy looking cardboard box with trinkets inside for $25+...)
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Now that's a channel I'd subscribe to!
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The primary lesson I learned from this is that if you give your child a tablet...
I hate to break it to you but you've been deceived. As tempting as it may seem to give a tablet to a young child to keep them quiet & then rationalise to yourself, with the help of clever marketing, that it's benefiting them rather than you, no, tablets cannot teach your children anything -- they're pure "mind candy" for kids. There's a tonne of research on this in particular & also decades of research into developmental psychology that implies that teaching machines ain't going to work with the tec
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ok, so what's the alternative if everyone in the house has to work?
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Work.
Homeless children do far worse in every metric than homed ones.
It's also a false dichotomy. You can have kids on the tablet for 8 hours a day while you work, then teach them things in your off time.
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Work.
Homeless children do far worse in every metric than homed ones.
Who forced you to have kids? If you have them, look after them.
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Tell me then, how many parents have the money to raise their kids without working? 5%? You think civilization can survive the population falling by 95% per generation?
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Just let them run wild until you get home. That's how I grew up.
When I learned that attacking a can of spray paint with an axe was a bad idea, luckily I'd also learned to flush my eyes with water if I get something in them! No harm, no foul.
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The primary lesson I learned from this is that if you give your child a tablet, I strongly advise some cheapo amazon tablet in a rubber case without any real wifi access but just use the app "video for android" and load up all sorts of pre-approved youtube videos from PBS (or just the pbs app with wifi enabled) so he can avoid the youtube garbage
I had no choice because my 2nd grade kid was assigned youtube video links for home-learning.
Instead, I write a "noscript" thing for youtube which erases all the suggested videos and comments and search results. That way, she followed the link to the video the school told her to watch, and there was nowhere else for her to go. (I know that an older kid could have worked around this.)
I bet (Score:2)
...he's the boy king of hate-mail as well.
Re:I bet (Score:5, Funny)
I think he is one of the most hated characters in children's entertainment today by parents. I think the show Paw Patrol comes a close second.
None of the kids in my life watch any of Ryans shows so my exposure to him has been minimum. The few times that I did encounter one of his shows I found his parents so annoying to render the show unwatchable. It was plain to me they were just manipulating the kid to make money off him.
The show I really can't stand is Paw Patrol. That show has no redeeming value. It only exists to sell expensive junk to kids. The adults are idiots, the kid and his pack of mutts are the only thing that can accomplish anything.
The one thing that bugs me the most about Paw Patrol is there is no consequents' for the episodes villains. Nobody goes to jail, or the ER, just nothing.
But the thing that gets me the most is why can the live dogs talk but the robot dog can't!!!
Oh look, they are here with my meds.
Chill out, kids save the day in kids movies!!... (Score:2)
So the whole "parents hating kids' stuff" is a story older than me. When I was a kid, I am s
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So the whole "parents hating kids' stuff" is a story older than me.
That's because broadly speaking, kids have no taste.
There's some good kids stuff out there, just not nearly as much as the vast array of mediocre to awful stuff. The good stuff tends to arrive by chance when a team winds upon the project who really care about it. The company wants to crank it out on a budget and sell toys.
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The show I really can't stand is Paw Patrol. That show has no redeeming value. It only exists to sell expensive junk to kids.
Hell, that's been the case since at least the 80's. Most cartoons basically existed to sell toys. He-man, GI Joe, MASK, Transformers, GoBots, Smurfs, She-ra, Starwars Ewoks, Mr T, Silver Hawks, Voltron, Donkey Kong, Pac Man, Thundercats, just to name some off the top of my head. All backed by toy lines.
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Sounds like you need to chill with Barney and the Teletubbies. Maybe take some Caillou for a chaser. ;)
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Caillou is the devil. THE DEVIL
https://www.fatherly.com/play/... [fatherly.com]
Re: I bet (Score:2)
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It only exists to sell expensive junk to kids.
As a child of the 80s, that pretty much described all the shows we'd watch, too. The shows were all half-hour-long action figure commercials, with interstitial ads for various other toys and sugary junk foods. I'm also pretty sure The Smurfs was thinly veiled communist propaganda (seriously, there was even this one episode where they discovered a magic crystal device analogous to television, all the Smurfs become addicted to watching it, and Papa Smurf ends up banning it).
I don't have kids, but if I did,
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The show I really can't stand is Paw Patrol. That show has no redeeming value. It only exists to sell expensive junk to kids. The adults are idiots, the kid and his pack of mutts are the only thing that can accomplish anything.
The one thing that bugs me the most about Paw Patrol is there is no consequents' for the episodes villains. Nobody goes to jail, or the ER, just nothing.
But the thing that gets me the most is why can the live dogs talk but the robot dog can't!!!
Oh look, they are here with my meds.
You do realize this is a show for pre-schoolers right? Believe it or not, you are not the target audience.
And the show doesn't sell anything. Sure, you can buy branded toy merchandise with the characters (none of which is advertised in the show), but you've been able to do that for pretty much any popular kids show since the 1970s. I'm sure the talking, mystery-solving dog Scooby-Doo rings a bell.
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The show I really can't stand is Paw Patrol. That show has no redeeming value. It only exists to sell expensive junk to kids.
It's been that way for decades. In the 80s we had toy based shows like He-Man and Transformers. In fact in the 80s it was worse, because they had to include a preachy bit at the end so that the entire half hour could be "educational programming".
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And now you know!
And knowing is half the battle.
Britney Spears (Score:3)
This kid is fucked.
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What the parents are doing with Ryan is really abuse when it comes down to it. As has happened with many child stars before and will happen with many after. He hasn't and will never have anything approaching a normal childhood because of his parents. All the development and socialization normal children go through is inaccessible to him because of his fame. And when he inevitably ages into an adult and his 15 minutes of fame comes to an end he could end up suffering the consequences of his parent's greed fo
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If his parents are financially responsible and put a large chunk of that $25mil/year into a trust, it may not be the worst tradeoff. You can pay for a lot of therapy with that kind of cash.
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He's more influential than you are. He's a published author and has youtube subscribers. You don't even have a pseudonym!
All you have is your jealousy, and a small handful of sock puppets. And apparently, some Very Important imaginary friends.
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It's still exceedingly poor form to make one-liner posts for no reason other than to spam affiliate links. Which he stopped doing for awhile, but now they're back . . .
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I haven't seen anyone reposting your affiliate links. Definitely not your detractors; granted, I haven't been paying much attention. Mostly I see them quoting people who have complained about you in the past in spammy form posts.
Do us all a favor and pull that link out of your sig, thanks. Why can't you be more like APK? At least he was funny, sometimes. And he was MUCH better at gaming the system than you.
That moment you feel very very old... (Score:4, Insightful)
... yeah, that.
I always promised to myself, I wouldn't become that crusty crumbly old grey beard, shaking his fist at the sky.
I promised I would keep up to date, keep myself relevant, understand the way the world changes.
I managed to do that probably up till the age of 50.
I'm now 54.
I can no longer do this.
Stories like this one - "the boy king of youTube" - just, twist my noggin' man.
The level of consumerism we have reached in this modern society, sees a very young boy, with 30 million followers, pretty much peddling goods to other young children.
His parents are cool with this, somehow. I guess money talks, right?
He is effectively working for a living, at an age when most kids are just out there playing, carefree, having fun.
Oh, I'm no fool (at least, not completely), I'm aware children have been forced into work for much of human history, but this kid is earning a truck load of money - and I guess those that use this kid, are making a WHOLE lot more.
Money is religion. Consumerism is religion. That empty hollow feeling that more and more consumerism fails to fill.
I think I'm going to have to check out somehow, from all of this madness. I don't mean the "shuffle off my mortal coil" checkout, just ... stop participating in all online activity, except what is required for my job as a software engineer.
I have failed to feel relevant.
I no longer understand this type of world.
I don't agree with it, I don't like it, it makes me feel a little sick in the stomach.
And with each passing day, I long to escape - to somehow accrue enough money to just buy a plot of land in the middle of nowhere, build a little house and say "laters!" to the entire planet.
But there's nowhere to escape.
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I mean I agree with most of what you said, I'm younger than you, by over a decade - but, I am curious, at what point did you understand the world, and how? In my experience, it's just the same shit show rehashed. There's a Sneaker Pimps lyric from the song Low Five [youtube.com] "... just change with no real progress ..."
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You are not alone. Kids these days seems to praise being dumb and ignorant and I despite the people who takes advantage of that to make money or gain power. To me, it is not a valid way to live.
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Imagine just how far they could get by spending that time productively to learn a skill or master some talent?
That was probably the same line of thinking that go us daylight saving time. "Just think of all the productive things people could do if we made 'em get up an hour earlier!" Some people don't want to be productive beyond what is required of them to survive, and that's why it's called freedom.
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I'd rather have kids wasting time on Tik Tok than out vandalizing property, shooting slingshots at squirrels, or whatever it is that bored kids used to do before they had the distraction of technology. Just as it has always been, the kids who have an aptitude for success will work hard at productive pursuits that lead to well paying careers, and the slackers will slack off and will be tomorrow's burger flippers and gig economy workers.
As that judge character said in Caddyshack "the world needs ditch digger
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As that judge character said in Caddyshack "the world needs ditch diggers, too."
Not for long, at least not the human kind. Construction workers are increasingly using machinery to do that. It requires a minimal level of competence and individual responsibility to operate the heavy machinery (e.g. consistently showing up not drunk or on drugs), which is unfortunately out of reach for some people.
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Since the industrial revolution, a "ditch digger" is meant figuratively. The implied meaning of the expression can be any number of low-paying menial jobs which can be picked up by someone who spent their youth playing with Instagram filters rather than studying.
Becoming a curmudgeon (Score:3)
... yeah, that.
I always promised to myself, I wouldn't become that crusty crumbly old grey beard, shaking his fist at the sky.
Wait, you didn't want to do that? I've been looking forward to becoming a curmudgeon for decades. It's one of the few indisputably positive privileges of old age!
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Wait, you didn't want to do that? I've been looking forward to becoming a curmudgeon for decades. It's one of the few indisputably positive privileges of old age!
Right? Waving you cane in the air and complaining about kids on the tick-book is livin' the dream.
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Sounds like you need some thorazine [i.redd.it]!
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But why this (Score:2)
I mean, when we were kids, it was child actors peddling goods on TV, in movies, magazines, or whatever. Commercials, movies, shows... anything for kids was basically to sell merchandise after the fact. Remember video game magazines? Saturday morning cartoons? Unless you lived under a rock, had no TV, were permitted to see no movies, read no magazines, etc (I knew a few kids like this), your entire childhood was steeped in targeted commercialism.
Surely you realized this at some point. Which is why I hav
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It's ok, we all agree with you on this one.
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His parents are cool with this, somehow. I guess money talks, right?
His parents created and managed their kid's YouTube channel. It's really no different than parents who drag their kid(s) around to talent scouts, auditions, and what-not because they want to live vicariously through their offspring's fame, except YouTube cut out the middle man. Children have been exploited in the production of Children's entertainment for a long time. Read up on Bobby Driscoll.
Kids who have this sort of lifestyle foisted upon them sometimes turn out fine (Elijah Wood, Leonardo DiCaprio),
Re: That moment you feel very very old... (Score:3)
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You say you no longer understand this (type of) world
but you do. You clearly said "peddling goods to other young children." and "I guess money talks, right?"
"promised to myself, I wouldn't become that"
that necessitates never becoming aware of the stupidity around you
It was bad advice and, thankfully, it failed.
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Child celebrities have been a thing forever, although this guy is unusually young. The cast of Harry Potter were about 12 in the first movie, I think the cast of Stranger Things were about the same.
On the one hand the law in most places doesn't allow children to work, except for a few very limited exceptions like delivering newspapers. That prevents exploitation and them missing out on schooling. On the other hand, where it is allowed for gigs like acting it seems to have worked out pretty well for many of
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Wait until you are 64.
I'm not religious, but if I were, I'd be convinced beyond any doubt that this world is, in fact, hell, and we were all sent here for crimes committed in a previous life in another realm. We are probably kept ignorant of all that to see if we're truly redeemable, or not.
But like I said, I'm not religious. It sure is tempting though.
funny... (Score:2)
of course it helps (Score:2)
...when YouTube is aggressively blocking other popular YouTubers whenever they don't like what they're saying.
Hard to build an audience when the rug keeps getting yanked.
He's still a kid (Score:1)