A fifth of the site’s top 100 channels are focused on toys, while young viewers are also driving big views for kids’ music, cartoons and vlogs Ryan’s Toys Review is one of the top YouTube channels. Like most pre-school children, Ryan loves playing with toys – from cars, trains and Lego to Disney toys, Play-Doh and Minions. Unlike most pre-school children, he’s playing with those toys for an online audience of millions. Ryan is the young star of Ryan’s Toys Review, a YouTube channel with more than 2.5 million subscribers and 4bn video views – startling figures given that his channel only launched in March 2015. Ryan’s toy reviews are so popular that he was the second biggest channel on YouTube in March 2016 according to online-video industry site Tubefilter, which uses data from analytics firm OpenSlate. He may soon be topping that chart: in March, Ryan’s 645.2m video views were only slightly less than Justin Bieber’s 646.2m views that month.
There are plenty more toy channels where Ryan sprang from: toy reviews and unboxings are one of the biggest genres on YouTube. Twenty of the top 100 channels are focused on toys: Disney Car Toys Club, Fun Toyz Collector, Toy Monster, Toys and Funny Kids Surprise Eggs, CookieSwirlC, Blu Toys, Hobby Kids TV and Disney Car Toys all join Ryan in the top 50. Between them, these 20 channels racked up 4.7bn video views in March alone, capitalising on the massive amount of children flocking to YouTube. Children may love watching toy unboxings, but not everyone is so happy with this trend. Criticism of the YouTube Kids app launched by Google in 2015 has included concerns about whether toy channels blur the boundaries between TV and advertising too much. There is more to the burgeoning world of children’s YouTube channels than toys, though. British Minecraft gamer Dan “The Diamond Minecart” Middleton had the 12th biggest YouTube channel in March with 337.4m views, for example.
He is now building his online popularity into offline income with a sold out UK tour. Nine nursery rhyme channels are in the YouTube top 100 chart, headed by another British channel – sixth-placed Little Baby Bum – with its 492.4m March views. Baby Big Mouth (322.9m views) and ChuChu TV (318.5m) are also riding high. Russian cartoons are proving popular: Masha and the Bear was the eighth biggest YouTube channel in March with 456.3m views, closely followed by ninth-ranked Get Movies with 418.4m views. In total, 42 of YouTube’s 100 biggest channels that month were aimed at children, generating 10.3bn video views. Only two of them came from well-known traditional kids’ brands: Disney Junior UK’s channel in 50th place on the Tubefilter chart with 200.7m views, and Lego’s channel in 63rd place with 169.9m. It’s a sign of the strange new online-video world that those two Lego and Disney channels combined still fall nearly 275m views short of a child called Ryan playing with whatever toy his parents have surprised him with that week.
That said, Disney and Lego are among the most popular products reviewed on the big toy channels, so they are unlikely to be complaining too much about this trend. • Little Baby Bum: how UK couple built fifth-biggest YouTube channelPets doing silly things and even Taylor Swift's latest video may generate millions of views, but it's a video that shows a woman removing toys out of packaged that is the internet's top earner. According to a video analytics platform called OpenSlate, the highest YouTube earner of 2014 made nearly $5 million just by opening Disney toy packages.The DC Toys Collector YouTube channel features a woman removing the toys and then putting them together. Like christmas every day: Mysterious toy-unboxer DC Toys Collector was the most popular YouTube channel in October with 400m views a month Another gift: The channel features a young woman in intricately painted nails removing the toys from their packaging and then assembling themThe channel features over 1,600 videos and gets 380 million views a month.
Its most-played video is Play-Doh Sparkle Disney Princesses. The video has been viewed more than 172 million times since it was posted in July. Unboxing is a relatively new genre of YouTube videos, and DC Toys Collector struck while the iron was hot. Unboxing videos show off the features of a product, most often a piece of technology.Essentially the videos are a virtual tour of a product in which you're interested.Here, the user unboxes everything from Disney princesses, to tubs of Play-Doh, to Lego sets. Toy unboxing usually shows the narrator assembling a toy for the viewer. Playtime: The channel has about one new video a day. DC Collector is part of a new, highly lucrative genre of online videos called 'unboxing' Unreal: The one-woman toy-reviewing YouTuber called DC Toys Collector is making more money than most CEOsOnly the narrator's hands and the product being unboxed are usually seen.Despite the channel's massive, sweeping, and somewhat perplexing popularity, no one — neither the toddlers who watch it along with their parents, nor executives at YouTube seem to know who is behind it.
Children love the videos. One uploaded to DC Toys Collector's channel on Friday called Teletubbies Stacking Cups Surprise Eggs Play-Doh already has 200,000 views.All her videos start the same way with the toy being introduced. The woman then goes on to open and 'play' with the children's toy pointing out various 'adorable' features.Dane Golden, who works in the YouTube channel ecosystem as the VP of marketing at Octoly has followed Disney Collector for some time.'What I believe to be true is that kids are loving this because the woman never shows her face,' Golden said to BuzzFeed. 'You never see anything but her well-manicured hands. She has a very comforting voice. It's just like playing with other kids playing toys. I think she disappears in the mind of the children.' So simple: The user unboxes everything from Disney princesses, to tubs of Play-Doh, to Lego sets Colorful character: Unboxing YouTubers don't typically have sponsorship connections to the brands of products they're unwrapping