To ask would you exploit your kids on YouTube for millions of £s?

[Laalaalaand]

My kids like to watch the channel vlad and niki on YouTube. The parents make between 45 and 60 million dollars a year off their YouTube channels which exclusively feature the children. They seem like sweet kids but they must spend a lot of their time filming all these videos. They have action figures of themselves. They live in the lap of luxury and want for nothing materially but i don't think even if i knew how to make these videos etc that would make me use my children to make money. Those videos will be there forever.

Vlad and niki are the two older children and they seem to be featuring less but the parents have had two younger children and the majority of the newer videos seem to focus on the two little ones.

The cynic in me says that maybe the older children have had enough of it, so that's why they're not doing it or maybe they're not "cute" enough now they're pre teens as the target audience is small children.

Would you do it for millions of quid? Could be argued that they're not doing anything actually harmful to the children so why not if it means the children end up rich beyond their wildest dreams.

No.
Shouldn't be allowed.
8 passengers shows what can happen in extreme cases

There’s a large family in uk do this

I don't think any children under the age of 16 should be shown on social media by their parents. Let alone to earn money from them. I find it disturbing tbh.

People need to get out of the mindset that being ultra rich is the only thing to aspire to in life.

This is actually a tough one. If I could guarantee that we'd make £60m in one year of posting content showing the children, I think I would do it. For one year. And the content would be extremely carefully created for maximum safety, nothing that would be degrading (obviously) or embarrassing to them.

£60m would mean financial security for generations and especially with a disabled child, this is very tempting. I'm not sure I could pass that up for my children.

Suspect a lot of people who would claim that they'd never entertain it would actually jump at the chance if it were guaranteed to be this successful.

8 passengers is the first thing I thought of too. I recently listened to a really interesting podcast about that case and the psychology behind it, in terms of behaviours being lauded and justified by 'fans' and creepingly becoming more and more extreme.

Not for any amount of money would I put my DS out for public consumption. He only appears on our social media to a very select audience and only in stories that disappear, not permanent posts.

Yer 😂

No.

Money means nothing if your mental health is bad and I can't imagine growing up in a pressure filled spotlight is particularly healthy.

If the videos aren’t embarrassing or making the kids look bad, plus enable the parents to didn’t lots of time with their children and to give them a secure future not sure I see the issue. Kids act on tv and in films all the time and make money I don’t see a difference. Especially if the older ones are allowed to stop when they’ve had enough.

That’s a loaded question 😃

No. I wouldn't. It's wrong and exploitative. Let them grow up anonymous and enjoy those freedoms.

Sadly there are many more cases where parents put their children on social media for hardly any money at all.

YouTube also has a problem of underage users uploading content such as vlogs with no adult supervision at all. And then being at risk from the predatory adults that the algorithm sends their way.

YouTube like other social media apps doesn’t do enough to stop this, because it’s more concerned about creating the next generation of addicted young users.

At those figures you can understand it a bit more, although they wouldn’t have known going in to it how much they’d be making. The sad thing is how many do it for a hell of a lot less.

I feel similar. One of my children has autism and I am so stressed about what his future holds. I"d love to buy him a flat in some sort of trust and have some sort of other trust give him an income. Then give my other child a boost so he didn't feel that his brother got looked after and he didn't

But I think there must be so many failed attempts. And it's hard to know what might embarrass your child at a later date.

edited to add. Obviously exploit is a very loaded word. So I wouldn't exploit them. No.

The problem is (speaking as someone who had a mildly successful YouTube channel about 10 years ago) the chances of actually "making it" with YouTube are almost zero, it's a very, very competitive landscape, you have to know marketing inside out and calculate everything you do and still make it look like you're just messing around in front of a camera, and so what you'd mostly be doing is exploiting your kids and not even getting anything for it.

My older grandson became addicted to Vlad and Niki and worryingly started to mimic their tantrum like behaviour. The films are now banned in our houses. I know that isn't quite what you were asking, but an offshoot of these children thinking they can get away with anything.

It should be illegal to make money from posting your kids on YouTube and TikTok.

My question is how much of the income is the children's? If the children are the ones bringing the viewers then what percentage is theirs?

The problem is you a) can't garuntee you'd be successful and b) have to produce a hell of a lot of videos to get anywhere near 60mil.

I don't think we know yet how it effects children being so heavily exposed on social media. I'd think about them getting bullied in school, struggling to make proper friends

If I could garuntee I'd make 60mil in just a year I'd probably do it. But that's not the case. So no I wouldn't launch a family channel

Agree. Health is wealth.

They can’t consent.

They can’t consent to the weird parasocial relationships people will have with them.
They can’t consent to AI scraping their images and voices to be made into whatever degenerate ideas the developers have in mind.
They can’t consent to blurring the boundaries between private and public, family and fake.

I feel sure that if I had made that much money from having my children on Youtube, they would have demanded a high percentage of it when they were old enough to realise!
In reality, for a few years now my children have told me I am not allowed to post pics of them on social media (private accounts) and I feel I have to respect that so I don't do it. Once one of my children's friends posted a picture of me for a laugh and I was really upset about it and demanded they deleted it!

No, having your (not even authentic but highly choreographed edited) childhood videos online to be dissected, bitched about and commented on forever is awful.
and from a practical point of view those type of videos tend to have terrible cpm 😂there’s better paid niches that don’t involve exploiting your children for a cash grab.

Agreed.

It amazes me that there is still no legislation protecting children in this way and they can be exploited so easily.

Channels like 8 passengers have shown what can happen and I hope in 10-15 years time the tide will turn as a generation of children quite rightly sue their parents!

I think history will look back on this as a very strange time in our treatment of children.

There was a really interesting channel 4 documentary (I think!) where they found out that the vast majority of viewers of these channels were adult males. They interviewed a woman who had her first period posted by her mum and it made me physically sick.
Parents know what they are doing, look at Ryan’s toy review as soon as he reached puberty his sisters had to start working. Disgusting.