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 channelThe bizarre, lucrative world of 'unboxing' videosChat with us in Facebook Messenger. Find out what's happening in the world as it unfolds.Story highlights"Unboxing" videos are a growing and surprisingly lucrative genre on YouTube The videos show everything from electronics to small animals being removed from boxesThere are 6.5 years worth of YouTube videos with "unboxing" in the titleUnboxers can earn up to $4 per 1,000 viewsAs far as popular videos go, it would seem to pale next to viral skateboard crashes, comedy sketches or music clips. And yet this video has been viewed more than 35 million times since it was posted to the FluffyJet channel on YouTube in 2012.The most popular unboxings are for expensive gadgets, like the iPhone, Xbox and PlayStation consoles.
Competition for these views is fierce. Tech-news sites rush to post their own slideshows and videos of brand new Apple products being birthed from their high-end packaging. Companies have even started uploading their own unboxing videos to official YouTube channels, like this clip of the new Xbox One from Microsoft that has been watched more than 3 million times. There also are unboxing videos for blenders, Uggs, coffee machines and live reptiles. "If someone really cares about Kinder Toys and you also have chainsaws, they're not going to subscribe," said the unboxer.Some people actually find watching an unboxing clip to be satisfying and enjoyable. As any kid on Christmas morning can tell you, the process of ripping open paper and figuring out what's inside a package is half the fun. (Some YouTubers take the thrill to its literal conclusion and post videos of themselves opening birthday and holiday presents.) The Lego Movie Directors: Phil Lord, Christopher Miller Genre: Animation, action, comedy Running time: 100 minutes Rated PG With Will Arnett, Elizabeth Banks, Craig Berry (Recommended)
If you'd told 10-year-old me there was going to be a movie all about Legos and the world they inhabit, I'd have been in line at the theater right then. Oh, it's not out until 2014? Okay, let me just build a time machine out of Legos and travel to the future. But adult me, hardened by years of non-Lego life experience — insipid toy-to-movie adaptations like Battleship, for instance, plus a sore lack of a regular free-form building sessions — had his guard up. Wasn't necessary: The Lego Movie may be one giant advertisement, but all the way to its plastic-mat foundation, it's an earnest piece of work — a cash grab with a heart. Made for, with and about Legos, the movie is also made for, with and about imagination, and when that association seems completely natural, it's a win all around. The movie chooses as its hero the unimaginative but boundlessly positive Emmet (voiced by Chris Pratt), who's just another average Lego guy living in the big Lego city going about his regular Lego day.
As with most things Lego, there's an instruction manual for everything, and Emmet eats, watches and says exactly what he's supposed to. The instructions say that's how you fit in, make friends, lead a happy life — only somehow that hasn't worked out for Emmet, who doesn't really have friends yet. (There's an unsubtle critique of mainstream conformity going on here, exemplified by the transparently dumb yet incredibly catchy Lego pop hit "Everything is AWESOME," which won't be leaving your head for days after you hear it.) There's an evil mastermind bent on destroying the world, a prophecy about a chosen one and a spirited adventure to get to, but let's talk for a second about how this movie moves: When Emmet showers, the water and soap suds are Lego pieces. When circumstances lead Emmet out of the city and across Lego deserts, forests and oceans, the land, sea and lava are all solid Legos. Animated in 3-D, but made to look like it's a stop-motion joint, the movie takes pleasure in translating how we move to a Lego-based reality and revels in the goofiness of a world operating under Lego-specific laws of physics.
When you ride a horse its legs stay frozen even at a gallop; your head can swivel 180 degrees; and Krazy Glue spells immobilizing doom. Writer-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, charged both with balancing the needs of a brand and telling a lighthearted story, never miss an opportunity to get silly with how Legos work: When Emmet catches a mysterious woman named Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks) poking around the construction site where he works, for instance, the slow-motion hair flip you've seen in a thousand Hollywood romances is a clip-on hair piece swiveling back and forth on her The self-conscious, irreverent tone holds steady as the stakes increase. When Emmet finds a strange red piece that sticks itself to his back, Wyldstyle identifies him as The Special — the smartest, most talented, most interesting, most superlative-in-everything person who's destined to save the Lego world from the order-obsessed Lord Business (Will Ferrell). Of course Emmet goes along with the idea, with Pratt lending him a can-do enthusiasm that's infectious to everyone but the movie's other characters — especially once Wyldstyle, along with sage Lego wizard Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman), and a brooding, self-absorbed Lego Batman (Will Arnett) discover that he's not special at all.
That doesn't stop Emmet from being pursued by Bad Cop (Liam Neeson), on orders from Business, across the diverse Lego world. (If there's a Lego set for it, they go there.) Neeson also voices Good Cop — the split personality living on the back side of Bad Cop's head — and it's a rare delight to hear Neeson depart from the growl for cheery words of encouragement. Energetically plotted and lousy with jokes, The Lego Movie succeeds as much more than a marketing ploy, not least because it understands what makes Legos so appealing and embraces the anarchic way kids actually play with them: The instructions are there, but often the most fun you can have is when you break the rules and assemble something weird and new that only you could create — whether it's a spaceship built from mountains and alligators or a double-decker couch. Emphasizing that idea too bluntly in a sharp swerve near the movie's end almost sends our heroes jumping the Lego shark, but it's hard to fault the filmmakers for getting a little saccharine;