Skip to main content

An eight-year-old U.S. YouTuber earned $26 million in 2019

Ryan of Ryan’s World. Image used with permission by copyright holder

Most eight-year-old kids love playing with toys, but there’s one out there who’s turned it into a business that raked in an eye-watering $26 million in 2019 — $4 million more than last year.

According to data released by Forbes this week, American Ryan Kaji is the highest-paid YouTuber for 2019 thanks to a toy-focused channel launched by Ryan and his parents just four years ago.

It began with toy reviews before broadening its content to science experiments, challenges, skits, and music videos. Millions of fans from around the world have been quick to hit the subscribe button, with the Ryan’s World channel (formerly Ryan ToysReview) now reaching more than 23 million followers. His videos regularly get several million views and have been watched in total more than 34 billion times. Yes, billion.

New videos appear on Ryan’s channel pretty much daily, with most running for between 5 and 10 minutes.

Asked in an NBC interview last year why he believed Ryan’s World had become so popular, the young YouTube star said: “I’m entertaining and I’m funny.”

Success on YouTube has led to plenty of other income opportunities for Ryan, with a portion of the $26 million coming from branded toys, clothing, and other goods that fans can find on Amazon or at stores like Target and Walmart. He even has a spinoff show on Nickelodeon, as well as a deal with Hulu to show his content.

Other creators in Forbes’ list of high-earning YouTubers include, in second place, Dude Perfect, described as five friends in their 30s playing sports, performing stunts, and breaking Guinness World Records, which generated around $20 million in 2019, and Anastasia Radzinskaya, a five-year-old Russian girl whose dad creates upbeat, colorful, and highly creative videos of his daughter acting in short skits.

YouTuber PewDiePie places at number seven with $13 million in earnings, though in 2020 his income may slip as he recently said he’ll be taking a break from the platform for an unspecified period of time next year.

Forbes defines a YouTube star as someone whose primary form of digital and media revenue comes from the video-streaming platform. To arrive at its estimations, it uses data from a range of companies to work out income generated from ads, sponsored content, merchandise sales, tours, and more.

Editors' Recommendations

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
YouTube TV now works in Safari on Mac
YouTube TV on Safari web browser on Mac.

One of the biggest live TV streaming services in the United States finally works on one of the three major browsers in the world. YouTube TV -- before today had been unavailable in Safari on MacOS — now works on Apple's default browser. (As spotted by 9to5 Google.)

Previously, going to tv.youtube.com would kick you to a support page on all the other ways to watch YouTube TV if you were trying to do so from Safari. There's no word on what changed in Safari (or MacOS) to allow YouTube TV to finally be supported, but we're also not going to look gift horse in the mouth.

Read more
The Roku-YouTube-YouTube TV impasse isn’t over yet
YouTube TV on Roku.

It's been several months since Roku and YouTube TV reached a cease-fire in their dispute over ... well, over a few things. But it now looks like the war is heating back up.

To recap, Roku in April 2021 first announced that negotiations that would extend YouTube TV's availability on the Roku platform had broken down. In doing so, it said that "Roku cannot accept Google’s unfair terms as we believe they could harm our users." Exactly what those disputed terms are has been a little ambiguous. Roku has said it has to do with search results. Google calls any allegations baseless.

Read more
YouTube Music is finally fixing its most annoying limitation for some free users
youtube launches music feat

A select group of YouTube listeners will have plenty to sing about on November 3. Starting that day, YouTube Music will allow music to continue playing in the background, such as when your screen is turned off or when you’re performing other mobile tasks, for some user of its free service. The catch, however, is that this option will only be available in Canada.

YouTube hasn’t announced any further rollouts in other countries as of yet. A lack of a date in any other country, however, seems to be a not-so-good sign that it will still be a while before YouTube unveils it anywhere else. 

Read more