This 6-year-old made $11 million on YouTube in one year

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/12/11/this-6-year-old-made-11-milli.html

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Reason #4,234,234 I won’t let my kids watch youtube.

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I’d like to see the audited financial statements.

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Im sure he’ll grow up to be something special.

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This has always seemed weird and exploitative to me, but maybe I’m just not the target audience.

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Holy shit, this video sucks. 26 minutes, are you kidding me? I couldn’t make it through the first two.

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I need to rethink my life.

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I vaguely recall seeing an interview on youtube with the parents earlier this year, i can’t recall who. Maybe DeFranco. But the parents were pretty cagey about answering questions, but my interpretation is that they’re trying to be careful in not making it seem like they’re exploiting or pushing their kid to be a youtuber if that’s not something he wants. It’s a hard balance to hit because its in the parents best interest to make money and keep the business going as long as possible. I can’t say for certain if the channel is something the kid is totally into but i hope its the case.

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He earned $11 million in revenue in twelve months.

I’ll bet his agents took a substantial commission.

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Another $11M and he’ll have saved up enough for college.

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That was my response, too. What’s the penalty for that article being wrong? Any? Hey, I “made over $100,000 a day in real estate”. It was only one day, when I sold my condo I’d owned for 13 years. But over 365 days, that’s $36 million.

Edit: I tried to find the source of this claim. WaPo wants me to pay to read their article and I won’t. SFGate says the original claim is from Forbes, but I can’t find it on their website. And Forbes claimed Trump was worth some $6 billion, so we know they take people at their word.

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Where’s that dancing baby these days?

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Found this on Forbes:

“Figures are based on data from YouTube, Social Blade and Captiv8, as well as interviews with agents, managers, publicists, producers and lawyers.”

“…interviews with publicists…and lawyers.” Like Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Ty Cobb, right?

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Yeah, on the one hand there are all kinds of laws meant to protect child actors that I’m guessing these parents wouldn’t even have glanced at, and on the other there are laws and guidelines around children’s TV programming designed to restrict how much advertising kids see. Of course, we all know there’s no laws on the internet (except copyright law)!

I’m sure that whatever toy companies are paying for these child vloggers would be worth it to effectively have a global sweatshop that makes unlimited half-hour infomercials for their products and crowds out educational shows.

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This is some very good bootstrapping here. Who needs to worry about these fabulous and “long lasting” tax cuts or even the middle class when you can exploit your kid playing for $11 million? What’s holding YOU back?

Seriously, though, is this what humanity has come, to a 26 minute video of a kid playing?

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Maybe I’m dead inside (well, I am dead inside, I just don’t know if it’s the key point here), but I don’t see anything good about this, and quite a bit that’s mildly disturbing.

Also, the idea that this is driven by a 3-6 year old child is bullshit. Kids that age are sock puppets and if the parents genuinely don’t understand that, it’s not at all an argument in their favor.

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In the White House. And he needs to be changed.

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15 seconds for me.

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It’s gonna be damn funny if he buys himself a congressman.

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some days i hate our world. this is one of them.

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