The Reality of Growing Up Online
What is it like to live your entire life in front of an audience of millions—from your birth to potty-training to puberty to adolescence? For many child influencers, this is their reality. They are public figures before they are even born; both the milestones and the mundane moments of their lives are captured by their parents and sold as content. Though child influencers—and the mom influencers and family vloggers who prop them up—are part of the multibillion-dollar influencing industry, until now, we haven’t known much about what it was like to be one. That’s what I’m changing with my book Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online. To answer these questions, I talked to kid influencers themselves, family vloggers, experts in the industry, digital ethicists, psychologists, and more.
A factor that can’t be ignored when it comes to child influencers is the staggering amounts of money that can be made in this industry. When we discuss why parents put their children’s entire lives on the internet, money is a big part of the answer. Though I’ve been reporting on the child influencer industry for years, I still found myself shocked by what I uncovered in this chapter of my book, where I dug into the amount of money parents and their kids are making.
The Rise of the Bee Family
In her best year as a family vlogger, Rossanna Burgos and her family made $1 million. It all started 10 years ago, when Rossanna’s husband posted Vine videos with their two young children that went viral. Rossanna (known to fans as Mama Bee) remembers asking her husband why so many people were watching. “He said, ‘People love us. They see themselves in us.’” Once their content started taking off, Rossanna’s husband Andrés (known online as Papa Bee) made the family YouTube and Instagram accounts. They now have 10.4 million YouTube subscribers and 1.9 million Instagram followers.
The Bee children, Gabriela and Roberto, were around nine and 10 years old when the family started creating content. The kids loved making videos with their parents, Mama Bee says. Their most popular video of all time has 106 million views and features Papa Bee placing covered plates in front of the kids who play rock-paper-scissors to determine who is going to eat a gummy food version of the real food the other one is going to eat. Roberto wins and chooses a covered plate that turns out to hold a gummy hamburger. Both kids cheer and bite into their burgers. The video continues with several more rounds of rock-paper-scissors and gummy foods including peppers, soda, and pizza.
Within a couple of years, the Bee family was approached for brand deals. Their first, Mama Bee remembers, paid them $500, which seemed “unbelievable” at the time. Outside of YouTube, Mama Bee worked in pharmaceuticals, and Papa Bee worked in market research, both netting six-figure salaries. As their platform continued to grow, there came a moment of reckoning. “And so my husband and I had a very serious conversation of, ‘We don’t want to look back when we’re 90 years old and say, I wonder what would have happened if we had [gone] all in.’” So they quit their jobs and dedicated themselves to YouTube. It took a few years before their new career exceeded their previous salaries, but in their best year, they made “in the vicinity of one million [dollars].”
The Economics of the Creator Economy
How do influencers make their boatloads of money? For the answer to that question, I reached out to Brendan Gahan, the CEO of the influencer marketing agency Creator Authority. Gahan, who has worked in the industry for 15 years, explains that there are several primary revenue streams. First, there is income from the platforms themselves: the TikTok Creator Fund and YouTube Adsense, where creators receive a split of ad revenue based on CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions).
The second way creators make money is through brand deals and sponsored content, which remains the largest source of income for most creators. The third way is through their own products or businesses, such as merchandise or branded toys. Fourth, big creators do appearances, speaking engagements, or conferences. Finally, the largest creators can be acquired, invested in, or given equity in larger companies. Additionally, affiliate links—where influencers gain commission by providing links to products they use—have become a massive, highly profitable component of the industry.
“There’s crazy, crazy amounts of money,” says Tyler Chou, an attorney for YouTube creators. “Being a family influencer is the best because as the mom, you can do everything, right? You can do fashion, you can do home goods, you can do all the kids’ foods. All foods, all foods basically you can touch. You can do kitchen appliances, you can do furniture. Of all the creators, I think being a family channel is probably the most profitable.”
The Cost of the Viral Lottery
As the kids grow, so do the opportunities for commissionable content. You can link to sippy cups, strollers, and toddler outfits. You can set up brand deals for snacks or Target-sponsored back-to-school shopping trips. And it’s not only kid-specific stuff; moms can do deals for any product related to running a household. “You can literally do anything,” Chou says. “Everything can be touched with a family channel.”
Once vloggers and influencers start to make real money, says Anthony Ambriz, a YouTube strategist in Utah, they offload the work of their channel and household. “They hire editors from the Philippines to cover editing and channel management,” Ambriz says. “They have videographers, household managers, nannies, housekeepers, managers for brand sponsorships.”
Though influencing is a global career, it seems to me a uniquely American pursuit. It appeals to the best parts of the American Dream: that anyone can be a success and have the white picket fence house and three-car garage to show for it. In a country where economic stability feels so precarious and increasingly unreachable for all but the wealthiest among us, is it any wonder Americans are taking their turn playing the viral lottery? In late-stage capitalism, where everything is a commodity, including you and your child, there’s a part of me that understands trading privacy for economic stability.
In an ideal world, childhood would be sacred, existing outside of the bounds of being turned into profit. But we’re not in that world—we’re in this one, where there are fewer and fewer paths to the ever-shrinking middle class, where childcare costs often outpace a parent’s entire salary, where student and medical debt continues to balloon—and where one sponsorship can net more than the average salary. I wonder if, when people rage against influencer parents, what they’re really raging against is the system that offers so few opportunities for advancement besides the commodification of the self. All you have to do is post.