The biggest star of YouTube’s second decade was born in 2011. He appeared on YouTube a mere three years and five months later, when his mother filmed him unboxing his new toy.
Ryan ToysReview: “Kid playing with toys Lego Duplo Number Train.” March 16, 2015. 15:13.
“Hi, Ryan!” “Hi, Mommy!” “What toy do you want today?” Ryan Kaji is crouched down in the Target aisle. He is adorable—chipmunk cheeks, dimples, big brown saucers for eyes. He is already pawing two red play trucks, but when his mother makes the offer, he abandons them. He has chosen his toy. We follow him out of the Target and to his home, where he spends the remaining fourteen minutes of the video unpacking the Lego train, bit by bit, practicing a count to ten, and guiding the train along the carpet.
Little Ryan’s parents met in college in Texas when YouTube was in its infancy. Shion, Ryan’s father, born in Japan, adored beatboxing YouTubers and bonded with his future wife, Loann, over Magic: The Gathering, a nerdy proto-internet card game. When Ryan, their firstborn, learned to watch, he fell for slightly older kids on YouTube like EvanTubeHD, a channel with a tyke who specialized in dismantling Angry Birds products. Ryan’s parents later said that they captured videos of their son to show family living overseas.
After his YouTube debut, the Kajis uploaded more than one hundred videos of Ryan in a six-month stretch. Mostly he played with one or two toys (Thomas the Tank Engine or a Play-Doh set). He struck gold that July when Loann filmed her preschooler playing with a “GIANT Lightning McQueen Egg Surprise with 100+ Disney Cars Toys.” The video borrowed ingredients from the faceless ones, those red-hot unboxing channels: a title of keyword mishmash, a plethora of toys, and a familiar franchise. Ryan’s giant red egg, almost as tall as he, housed Pixar surprises and bore a Pixar movie logo. A year later the clip had more than half a billion views—unheard-of numbers. Ryan’s channel then earned more than nineteen million views a day, double PewDiePie’s count. That GIANT Egg Surprise video catapulted Ryan and his parents to immediate, unanticipated fame and fortune, heralding an entire generation of child YouTube stars.
“I don’t know why so many people love that video,” his father admitted to a reporter. “If I did, I’d make a lot more just like it.”
A month before Ryan’s debut YouTube made an announcement: “Today, we’re introducing the YouTube Kids app, the first Google product built from the ground up with little ones in mind.” With amateur kids’ material growing like a weed, YouTube was trying to create order. Its new mobile app came with a selection of videos from the site, bigger bubblier buttons for smaller fingers, and a built-in timer and sound settings for parents. “Now,” a company director wrote in a blog post, “parents can rest a little easier knowing that videos in the YouTube Kids app are narrowed down to content appropriate for kids.” The blog made no mention of the fact that algorithms were doing the narrowing, not humans.
This app was free, with ads, like YouTube; the company believed this gave families equal access to its bounty. Also, YouTube had started embracing the commercial appeal of little ones. A 2014 document the company prepared for marketers boasted that it would take seven years to watch all videos marked as “unboxing” posted within just the prior twelve months—unboxed gadgets, skin creams, toys. In discussions with ad buyers YouTube staff carefully avoided the k word (kids); this was “co-viewing,” a term for parents watching alongside children because, legally, that was how it happened. Google Preferred, YouTube’s slate of higher-priced video placements for advertisers, had a section marked “Family and Children’s Interest.” The company didn’t share exactly what videos were there, but Tubefilter, a web magazine, did some sleuthing to find a list, which included Mother Goose Club and DisneyCollectorBR, queen of the faceless ones. On the Today show a father with obsessed offspring called DisneyCollectorBR unboxing videos “crack for toddlers.” Some suspected dopamine or mirror neurons at play—cells that fire off when we perform a task with a clear goal or see someone do it. Find out what’s in that surprise egg! Did kids watch these compulsively out of genuine interest or because YouTube teed them up one after the other? The phenomenon was still too new to study properly, and the company shared virtually no data with outside researchers.
Harry and Sona Jho operated Mother Goose Club out of a tenth-floor office on Wall Street filled with treadmill desks for Harry’s legal practice, and racks of colorful costumes and a green screen for YouTube nursery rhymes. On breaks from legal work, Harry diligently watched YouTube trends rise and fall, sometimes shifting overnight. At one point YouTube’s related videos panel filled with “Finger Family” videos: cartoon hands swaying on-screen singing a “Baa, Baa Black Sheep” knockoff, each finger depicting a member of a nuclear family. Jho traced its origin to an old video from Korea, which probably went viral because its “Daddy finger” wore an absurd Hitler mustache. (Unintentionally, Jho assumed.) Kids seemed to like the song and swaying fingers, and the videos were innocent enough, if not especially educational. But something else was happening here. Once a few Finger Family videos did well, tons more flooded the site; most were animated, though sometimes people wore outfits to perform the song-and-sway ditties themselves. YouTube’s machines, Jho realized, read that influx of material as a positive sign, so they heavily promoted the videos, inviting even more. Eventually, the Jhos made a Finger Family video, too.
The Jhos suddenly had a lot more company on YouTube. Families joined to bond together or grab ad money. Melissa Hunter, an extroverted operations director at a Manhattan realty firm, had to leave her job after a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. “What do you want to do for the summer since Mommy can’t leave the house?” she asked her eight-year-old. They both enjoyed watching doll-crafting videos on YouTube. Why not try making those? On their channel, Mommy and Gracie, they reviewed dolls, borrowing the silly, improvisational style of early YouTube. As views grew, Hunter also started an MCN for YouTubers who made videos for kids, discovering that most people running channels had limited media or business experience. Many early YouTubers were teens or twentysomethings, chasing dreams of making it in Hollywood or fashion. These were parents, with mortgages and college funds, who sometimes quit jobs to rely on YouTube’s ad sales, which only seemed to be going up and up.
Little Ryan’s astronomical success brought more toddlers to YouTube. And it brought corporate interests. Isaac Larian, a toy magnate running MGA Entertainment, maker of Bratz dolls, had learned about the YouTube trend from his children and ordered his company to design a toy made specifically to be unboxed. They invented L.O.L. Surprise!—candy-colored, bug-eyed dolls enclosed in opaque packaging (“like something out of an acid trip,” one reporter observed). Unlike on TV, where Larian had to buy commercials months in advance, YouTube offered him instant product feedback. To promote his new dolls, he handed them out to huge kids’ channels like CookieSwirlC, an anonymous toy handler. Soon the L.O.L. Surprise! line would be one of America’s top-selling toys, generating more than $4 billion in sales. Other toy makers had joined in, paying YouTubers to play with their products on-screen.
Harry Jho had expected this trend; toys were big on TV, after all. But he found another pattern more unsettling. Huge animation studios began popping up overseas, competing for YouTube’s preschool audiences. Digital animation software was so cheap and easy to program that it seemed some videos weren’t even made by humans. Animation factories churned out kids’ videos in a gushing, unstoppable torrent. YouTube had rules against uploading too many copies of the same video, but that was harder to enforce when animators learned to tweak their offerings ever so slightly—a different look for each Finger Family member. Content mills had always pumped out cheap YouTube footage, but adult viewers usually ignored it enough to sink it to the site’s bottom. Kids weren’t as judicious. In 2015, the year YouTube released its Kids app, Jho watched automated torrents aimed at children begin to spread “like a virus without any antibodies.”
Meanwhile, in San Bruno, YouTube shook up its strategy yet again. The company had plans to turn its three biggest categories—kids, music, and gaming—into apps. Wojcicki particularly homed in on music’s potential. People watched the hell out of music videos like “Gangnam Style” and Lil Jon’s “Turn Down for What.” Why should Spotify, a dinky Swedish company, win the music streaming game? But YouTube’s first attempt didn’t take. YouTube Music Key offered viewers who paid $9.99 a month ad-free access to music videos on the site, but it failed to get huge sign-ups. That was mostly because YouTube struggled to pick which clips were music videos and which weren’t. Robert Kyncl, the Hollywood chief, explained this epiphany with a personal anecdote: his daughter, while testing the music service, couldn’t find songs from Frozen in the catalog. “To her, it’s music,” Kyncl told a reporter. So, YouTube redrew its plans: its entire site—Lil Jon, gamers, toy unboxers, shock jocks—would go into a paid service free from ads, like Netflix or HBO. The company called it YouTube Red, like the carpet, unconcerned at first about the name’s resemblance to a popular porn site. (Later, the name changed to YouTube Premium.)
Kyncl had stuck around after Wojcicki took over and climbed further up the ladder to become YouTube’s “chief business officer,” overseeing relations with Hollywood, record labels, and creators. His Frozen anecdote doubled as a negotiating tactic. For YouTube Red his team had managed to persuade nearly every old media titan to move select material to YouTube. The only big holdout: Disney. In 2013, Frozen became the studio’s top-grossing animated movie and unleashed a mammoth franchise. Frozen didn’t live on YouTube, but its fans sure did, and practically every channel for kids, from little Ryan to the faceless ones, seized on this fandom by posting videos with Elsa figurines, Elsa dolls, Elsa cartoons, Elsa costumes, and Elsa titles and tags for the machines to read.
In Los Angeles, Maker Studios scrambled to fulfill its new duty as Walt Disney’s digital heir, starting with a toy reviewer binge. Maker’s executive, Chris Williams, who was on his second tour at Disney, signed five prominent unboxing channels into the studio’s YouTube network. He tried recruiting DisneyCollectorBR, the unboxing queen, managing to speak to the woman behind the account, which no journalist had been able to do. Although she declined to join the network, Williams did persuade her to remove “Disney” from the start of her channel name. In February 2015 the Daily Mail outed the account’s creator, possibly YouTube’s highest-paid performer, as a former adult film actress—a reminder that YouTube stars were unvetted, and now tabloid fodder.
When Maker staff joined Disney, they were told the legendary studio planned to go all in on YouTube, leaning into the crazed fandom for Frozen, Star Wars, and sports. (Disney owned ESPN.) Disney moved gingerly, though, publishing sparse movie trailers and promos for its TV network on YouTube. But when YouTube released its Kids app, the studio’s alarms went off. A Disney lawyer called up David Sievers, the Maker staffer who had moved to oversee its YouTube integration, and demanded, “What the hell is going on?” Federal law mandated that “child-directed” content, media designed for viewers under thirteen, had to follow strict rules on TV and couldn’t track viewer habits online. Yet the algorithm programming YouTube Kids had scraped up several clips from Disney TV shows the studio didn’t consider “child-directed.” Lawyers and Sievers set up a weekly call to review material in YouTube Kids and arranged privately with YouTube staff to remove any videos the studio didn’t want in the app.
The rest of YouTube’s app didn’t get this white-glove curation treatment. And on the East Coast, another concerned group took notice. Josh Golin, a former Miramax film distributor, directed the nonprofit Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, whose mission was exactly what its title said. Most of Golin’s work had focused on television, but when YouTube Kids arrived, he dug into the internet’s TV. Two months after its release he sent a letter to the FTC arguing that the YouTube app was full of “unfair and deceptive marketing” and toy videos that functioned as long, uninterrupted commercials. Most of the content on YouTube Kids, the letter said, would never legally fly on TV.
Advocates sent these sorts of stern notes all the time. Few in Silicon Valley or Washington, D.C., cared. So Golin kept digging and found more headline-grabbing material. A month later his group wrote another public letter. On YouTube Kids they had found wine-tasting videos, a power-saw tutorial, a profane Casino parody starring Bert and Ernie, clips with jokes about pedophilia, and another titled “One Huge Acid Trip?” The letter added a sample of app reviews, including a complaint that after a four-year-old had watched a Peppa Pig video, the YouTube Kids algorithm had recommended a pornographic cartoon called “Peppa Penis.” “Who is filtering these videos?” one parent wrote.
YouTube apologized for the lapse. It had set automated filters to sort videos into the app, but people uploaded new content faster than filters could handle.
Yet by August, only three months after Golin’s second letter, the dustup was largely forgotten. A reporter from Time came to witness YouTube’s tenth anniversary celebration in an open outdoor space behind its office, where Wojcicki had instituted YouTube Fridays, a Googley weekly staff meeting. The party featured, Time reported, “a bouncy castle, a slushy machine, some jumbo-size board games, oceans of red candy and a DJ.” Wojcicki donned a helmet to partake in Meltdown, a duck-the-spinning-propellers game played in a giant inflatable pool. (She was no stranger to embarrassment. Per tradition, Google execs arrived for work in costume if staff filled out more than 98 percent of employee surveys; Wojcicki usually went with animal onesies for the occasion.)
Out of the pool the executive told Time that her favorite YouTube video was a John Oliver rant from HBO on the value of mandatory paid maternity leave. For her fifth child, born eight months earlier, Wojcicki had taken only fourteen of the eighteen weeks Google offered. Wojcicki’s experience with her kids was “now a business advantage,” the magazine reported. “They are her first guinea pigs for many of her ideas.” Kyncl described his boss as “a very regular person–mom who knows what regular problems mean for a lot of people.”
YouTube’s decision to launch its Kids app as an algorithmically run free-for-all had not been unanimous. Years later several employees said they voted to screen or curate the app’s content. But they were overruled. The company knew preschoolers loved watching footage of trains on YouTube; unless it was a cartoon, that didn’t seem like standard kid’s programming, so it wouldn’t go in a curated app. But wasn’t that kind of unpredictability YouTube’s fundamental magic? Why keep kids from seeing that? Some staff pointed out that this would inevitably lead to showing children footage of train wrecks, given the popular YouTube pastime of watching disasters. One Google director who objected to YouTube’s decision was given a Googley reply: More information is better.
Indeed, much of Google’s operations were based on the slippery belief that a more informed public was necessarily a better-informed one.
And yet, buried under the trainwrecks and toy unboxing, YouTube did have a group as educational as any online. The company’s earlier attempt to bring its service inside schools didn’t take, but EduTubers, a cadre of creators with teaching backgrounds (or nerdy scholastic interests), had begun to flourish. Hank and John Green expanded their successful educational series to a new show for kids. Others unpacked science concepts with quaint animation or the whiz-bang-wow style of Discovery stations, only with more egghead detail. Many earned enough from YouTube ads to make videos full time. They were slightly older than other YouTube stars, with enough life experience to reject offers from MCNs. (PBS pitched a network concept but had few takers because YouTubers considered the station’s programs rather uninspired.) EduTubers wanted to entertain and establish careers online, but they seemed driven by another conviction: to inform, to get things right. Some started a habit of listing their source material directly beneath their videos, even though YouTube didn’t require or encourage that.
Many also seemed aware of a creeping threat to science taking root online: conspiracy theories that found new life and fuel on YouTube and social media—a noise that would, very soon, start drowning out reason.
YouTube always had videos with a dubious relationship to reality. “Loose Change,” an early, influential 9/11 “truther” film, first went viral on Google Video before hopping to YouTube. Staff paid little attention to this material or considered ways to suppress it. “There was a sense of, ‘The masses will figure out what the truth is. They’ll be a self-correction,’ ” recalled Ricardo Reyes, YouTube’s former communications chief. One staffer once proposed turning the booming footage on UFOs and other paranormal topics into a proper category, like on TV’s Syfy, where YouTube might strategically support creators involved, but the idea never panned out. Besides, defining a conspiracy felt thornier than defining “kid-friendly.” So YouTube let it be.
EduTubers, though, tried doing something. Several published clips carefully debunking other corners of the site that claimed climate change was a hoax or the earth was flat or other clear falsehoods. Destin Sandlin, an aerospace engineer from Alabama who posted under the handle SmarterEveryDay, explained the approach in one video. He pointed to his signature crest, a rendition of Reepicheep, a tiny fencing mouse created by C. S. Lewis, his favorite author. Sandlin’s wife had embroidered the character onto the polo shirts he wore on camera. “He’ll take on a foe that will most certainly kill him,” Sandlin said with a grin. “But if the foe is against truth, then he’s the enemy, so he must be attacked.”
A few inside YouTube pushed projects to better promote these EduTubers. Wojcicki liked to say how much she enjoyed watching them, particularly Simone Giertz, a Swedish inventor who posted a series of impish “shitty robot” clips. But the projects never had major support. And Wojcicki didn’t make a concerted effort to get these educational creators in front of younger audiences or the people gobbling up conspiracies on her site—at least until she was compelled to do it.
At the time, her company had other business priorities to deal with.