6-Year-Old Earns $11 Million Reviewing Toys

If you think kids’ toy reviews on YouTube are just child’s play, you couldn’t be more wrong. A 6-year-old name Ryan has earned $11 million so far this year reviewing toys on his family’s YouTube channel.

That’s according to Forbes, which recently ranked the top 10 highest-earning stars on the video sharing social media site. Cumulatively, those making the list earned $127 million, an 80 percent increase from 2016, Forbes said.

Patch has reached out to the young entrepreneur by email. We’ll let you know if we hear back.

The revenue comes from page views, which translates to advertising dollars. Ryan’s channel has been viewed at least 8 billion times this year. The world’s top YouTube earner was gamer Daniel Middleton, who earned $16.5 million on 11 billion views on his DanTDM channel, Forbes said.

Ryan, whose last name and precise location in the United States aren’t revealed on the YouTube channel, began his rise to fame and fortune in 2015 with a single video. The Ryan ToysReview channel now has more than 10 million subscribers.

Ryan is a typical kid in that he “loves toys,” according to the description of the channel, which features toy reviews “for kids by a kid.”

“He loves Cars, Trains, Thomas and friends, Lego, Superheroes, Disney toys, open surprise eggs, play doh , Pixar Disney cars, Disney Planes, monster trucks, minions, playtime at the fun, family fun adventure and so much more,” it says.

In an interview on TubeFilter, Ryan’s parents said he was looking at other toy review channels that had Thomas The Tank Engine reviews and asked why he didn’t have his own toy review channel.

“So we just decided — yeah, we can do that,” his mom said. “Then, we took him to the store to get his very first toy — I think it was a lego train set — and it all started from there.”

Also, his dad said, many in Ryan’s extended family live outside the United States, so the YouTube channel was “a great way to share childhood memories with them” and “a gret way for us to spend more time as a family and to bond with him.”

Within four months, the family noticed a spike in viewership. Every month, the views doubled — mainly among kids ages 3-7. Most of the viewers live in the United States, but Ryan also has followers in the Philippines and the United Kingdom.

Ryan’s mother, formerly a high school chemistry teacher, quit her job to focus on the channel full-time, she said. Neither she nor her husband, a structural engineer, had any previous video experience and “we’ve learned everything as we’re going," she said.

Ryan doesn’t keep all the toys the family buys for his reviews.

“We give a lot of them away to friends and family,” his mom said, “and also a lot of them away to charity.”

This video, showing Ryan opening a Disney Pixar Lightning McQueen Easter Egg toy, is one of the most popular on the channel. It has been viewed more than 802 million times.

Photo and video via Ryan ToysReview YouTube channel