Can you guess who earned the most on YouTube in 2019? I would not blame you for guessing one of the popular vloggers, esports stars, or someone similar, but you would be wrong. The winner was Ryan Kaji, an eight-year-old who pulled down a whopping $26 million this year thanks to his channel.
The great thing about YouTube is that virtually anyone can share their video creations with the world, and Ryan Kaji is an excellent example of that, as at eight years old, his channel has an incredible 23 million subscribers, with his top video sitting at 1.9 billion views. In addition to those numbers, Kaji's YouTube Channel, Ryan's World, beat out all other YouTube channels in revenue this year to pull down a jaw-dropping $26 million.
His channel began in March 2015, when after watching toy reviews on the platform, he asked his mother: "How come I’m not on YouTube when all the other kids are?" Eventually, his mother left her job as a teacher to help run the channel full-time. Since then, he has landed deals with Hulu and Nickelodeon, to name a few, and his toy review empire seems to show no signs of slowing down. It is quite the incredible achievement and really neat to see his success.
Pretty cool!
Wow! Astounding... I'm going to keep chasing my dreams. An eight year old just lit the fire again. :)
He was the top earner last year too at something like 24million. He also has a full on Nickelodeon show at this point as well as his channel. So does the no 2 group Dude Perfect. They earned something like 25 million.
Everyone can, not everyone does. Only handful succeed.
Lets define success...
Good question, Olivier.
Nice for the kid but how the feck was it allowed to happen when Youtube ToS state you have to be over 13 year of age to use the site.
And now theres COPPA this kids channel will die, won't it?
I came here to say that same thing. 2 years at the top, and COPPA will destroy him.
I would imagine, though COPPA will doubtless stop the monetisation, the amount of sponsorship and affiliate sales will probably make it a very viable business still. Hell just lose out on AdSense... Which is definitely the least profitable part of his empire.
He might lose a lot of opportunity for ad revenue but he has gigs with Nickelodeon and Wal-Mart. That kid and his family are set for life and don't need to be tied down to YouTube if they wanted to expand more.
Never heard of him
Thus proving the theory that there's abundance of a market for plenty of genres with internet based income streams.
Even I hadn't heard of his name before.