family vloggers try to defend themselves... 😬 "Born to be Viral" documentary | Internet Analysis

Hello my dudes. Welcome back to Internet Analysis. Today I have another episode about family vloggers. I was recently interviewed in this documentary series called Born to be Viral, which is about kid influencers and family channels. So, I had to make a video. No, like this is voluntary. They didn't ask me to do this. I'm not going to cover everything that happened in this series. It's um six episodes that are 20 minutes each. So, feel free to watch the whole thing yourself if you're interested. I'm just going to touch on the parts that are most intriguing to me. There are so many factors that make it very appealing. You can stay home with your family full-time. You can make memories and potentially make thousands, if not millions of dollars. That sounds like a dream life. So, the documentary crew followed a few families over the course of 5 years to see kind of their trajectory through family vlogging, which I think is pretty interesting. So, here are our main players. First family, the fish fam. We have Kyler and Madison plus five kids, including the very famous twins, Tatum and Oakley. Now, this might shock you, but this family is actually Mormon. Their YouTube channel has 4. 75 million subscribers. They have 7. 5 million on Tik Tok and then across Instagram, all the different family accounts and child accounts. They have a total of 6 million followers. Next family, we have the McClures, Ami and Justin. Then more twins, Ava and Alexis, and their younger brother, Jersey. The McClures have a few different channels, uh, which total over 9 million subscribers and 3. 8 million across multiple Instagram accounts. Both of these families, the Fish Fam and the McClures, they largely got famous off of their viral twins. Do you have the same face? Yes. Ava was born 1 minute older than Alexis. But I want to be older. And they were like toddlers, so they're adorable. and they have those little baby voices and they said cute things and people love them. Then the third family are actually aspiring influencers. So we get to see what it's like starting at zero. Will they be able to make it big over the course of 5 years? We have mom Daisy and her son Ethan and they had another baby. I don't know their name. By the way, I am covering the kids' faces as much as I can, which has been very tedious for this number of clips. Um, so if you notice any weird edits, that's all me. I went back and forth about this cuz in some ways it feels pointless because these kids are so famous and they're featured throughout this documentary. But still, I just don't like showing kids on my channel. So, it felt right to me. This series is an interesting look into the long-term experience of family vlogging because over the course of 5 years, a channel can change so much. You can have millions of followers, but that doesn't guarantee that your success is going to last. I think there has become more hate I guess or frustration with family vloggers. Family vlogging is getting like a bad rap. Some of the world may see it as some form of exploitation of kids. I saw it as family home videos and it turned into something amazing. And especially with family vlogging, the question of what happens when the kids grow up? adorable toddler becomes a kid or maybe a teenager who doesn't even want to be filmed at all? I also enjoyed hearing more from the parents because obviously those of us watching are pretty familiar with family vlogging and we know the common critiques of it. When you're in a traditional space, it's understood that it's work. Whereas this is labor without any protection or regulation. You're exploiting us and you're exploiting my kids right now for your gain. To have them asked in this setting where they don't have full control over what's asked or whether a director is going to push back or dig deeper into their response. you're using your kids and all this kind of stuff and like they only knew you just want to strangle these people. I don't know where the negativity is coming from and why people are so worried about kids being online. People say things like, "Well, you're exposing them to this or people who shouldn't be looking at little girls. " Maybe... those people walk around the world every day. Click analytics. 30% male, mostly 35 to 44. A male commented, "Please keep her safe. She's my future wife. " I found that interesting. I could always go for more digging, but let's get into it. I think people are getting jealous. People are realizing that they can make the amount of money they make in a year in 30 seconds. Yeah. First of all, I do think that level of inequality does bother a lot of people, especially in this current moment when a lot of people are struggling. It is insane to hear someone say that they make someone's salary in 5 minutes. And so, they try to make us feel bad going, "You're only making that money because your kids are in it. " I'm not going to let all these people in their little comments make me take down all the most memorable moments of my life. I'm trying to not be petty right off the bat, but I love the idea that like haters are the people in the little comments and yet obviously your fans are the reason that you're able to make so much money. I guess that's the catch 22 of being a content creator. But um my favorite things when I was a kid was my videos that my parents took. They're special. Yes, of course. Home videos are special. Nobody is stopping you from taking pictures or videos of your own kids. But posting them to millions of people and monetizing them is a different story.

It's like Satan's plan. Satan's plan is to take away families, take away happiness. Anything wholesome, they like want to attack it. Oh, you're exploiting whatever they can do to take away like good things in life. That's so wild to hear. Again, we know this is a Mormon family, but um criticizing family vlogging is Satan's plan. We're trying to take away families by being like, "Hey, maybe how does this affect the children? What kind of long-term impacts might this have? " Just asking questions. I don't know. But obviously, it makes sense why these parents are so defensive about this career. They are making bank. Kyler and Madison actually mentioned it like five times. There are some days where we could pay for an entire college career in one day. Days where we're able to make as much money or more than 90% of the people in this world make in one day. So, how could you ever complain? I mean, we've made millions, but we're not in like the next level like hundreds millions, obviously, which should be cool. We're so grateful that we're able to make the amount some people would make in an entire year just in a 5 minute video. Hit that subscribe button. Make sure you give this video a big thumbs up. I'm obsessed with how they try to present this in like a humble way. Like, yes, we make millions of dollars, but we're so grateful. You are flexing on us. Okay, we get it. But before we continue, this portion of today's video is sponsored by Ritual. Raise your hand if you've been slacking on taking your vitamins. I have. But it is really important, especially postpartum, for me to build my nutrient stores back up. So, here I am getting back on track. Rituals Essential for Women 18 plus is a high quality multivitamin for women 18 to 49. 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Click the link in the description and use code Tiffany Ferg to get 30% off your first order from Ritual. Family content, kid content. That's all very brand friendly and therefore very valuable. The top earning influencers, they've got sponsorships and brand deals worth five, six, probably even seven figures that can be very lucrative because you can essentially monetize your entire life. Obviously, it's no secret that family channels and kid influencers can make tons of money, but as usual, I am nosy. How much money are we talking? So, right now we're making about 30,000 a month from ad money on YouTube. So, if you add in brand deals and ad money, you could make up to $150,000 in one month. $150,000 a month. Right. We had a Nike brand deal and we had to do a few shorts and two videos, but it was worth it because first of all, the videos were fun and second of all, they paid us $500,000, so that was good. It's crazy how nonchalant she just said that. Even though it noted the parents said the deal was actually $125,000. Oh, that's it. Oh, just $125,000. Gotcha. It never ceases to amaze me how much money you can make making family-friendly content. And obviously, these creators are working with massive like household name brands But at the same time, it hurts my brain because so much kid and family content is just utter trash. But somehow it's getting millions of views. c'est la vie! You know, we know social media is not a meritocracy. I think what's really shocking is as a child to get accustomed to that. It is a different world. But on the note of family channels and money, let's talk about COPPA. Back in 2019, YouTube was fined $170 million for violating COPPA, which is a children's privacy law enacted in 1998. YouTube was illegally collecting data on child viewers and sending kids targeted ads. That's a big no no. So after the lawsuit, YouTube had to crack down and kind of shift the onus onto creators. Hey guys, we have new rules and guidelines, okay? Creators should be marking their videos as made for kids if they fit certain criteria. Well, what counts as made for kids? Basically, if kids are the primary targeted or intended audience, if the content features, you know, popular kids celebrities, characters, toys, games, activities, nursery rhymes, those are all signals that it's probably made for kids. But here's the kicker. Content that is marked as made for kids cannot

have those personalized targeted ads, which means it gets a way lower CPM, which means the creators get much lower ad revenue. CPM and RPM can vary widely. But let's say your typical RPM means you earn $5 per 1000 views... but for videos marked made for kids, it could be more like 50 cents, maybe. So, if you got 100,000 views, that would be like $500 versus $50 --- or a million views, the difference between $5,000 and $500. So, of course, family channels have tried to get around these rules because they want their videos fully monetized. So, when I started watching the series, I wasn't familiar with the fish fam or the McClures. I wanted to check out their channels and also see if they seem to be following COPPA. Spoiler, it looks like they are not a lot of the time, allegedly. But how do I know? Made for kids videos do not have comment sections because it's meant to protect the privacy of children so that you don't get comment sections full of kids being like, "My name is Tiffany. I'm 8 years old. This is my address. " You know, so if a video has a comment section, it clearly has not been marked as made for kids. But with COPPA overall in YouTube, there's a lot of gray areas because just because kids are in a video doesn't automatically make it made for kids. So, family channels can argue their videos aren't targeting kids, even if some kids happen to watch them. Their target audience is actually other parents or adults, right? But when it comes to most family vlogging channels, the kids are the stars. We all know that. And they're a big focus of the videos. You can tell by the titles and the thumbnails. And I would definitely argue that the vast majority of these videos are made for kids. You can tell by the subject matter. Again, they're doing kids activities. They're focusing on the kids and playing and toys and all this -- made for kids! But overall, it is very difficult to enforce COPPA. Similar to issues with undisclosed ads, many people are out here just blatantly disregarding the rules and hoping that they never get caught. So many channels get away with it, which allows them to earn basically like 10 times more in ad revenue than they should be if their audience is in fact mostly children. With that, let's talk about aspiring creators. Even aside from AdSense, there's plenty of money to be made on social media, especially with sponsorships. And as we've all heard, many kids these days want to be YouTubers, and many parents would love to be YouTube momagers. At least one in three kids wants to be a social media star when they grow up. There is this idea of equal opportunity. Everyone who has a phone can be a content creator. There's so many other forces at play. Luck, privilege... So, quickly, I want to talk about again the aspiring family vlogger channel, Daisy and Ethan. Daisy talks about how charismatic her son is and how he loves YouTube and he wants to make YouTube videos. So, they start trying to pursue this. They made a couple of videos, but they're struggling to gain a following. But what really stands out to me about the sections that focus on this family is how often Ethan, who I think at the start is like seven or eight years old, how often he talks about money, wanting to do YouTube for money. I would like to make content. people happy. I would like to make money. As we know, creators with large followings of kids, like the Paul brothers, many of them brag about how rich they are and their mansions and their cars and their cool stuff. So, of course, these children watching are absorbing this and going, "You know what? Being a YouTuber seems cool. I can make a lot of money. That's awesome. I hope I would get 10 million subscribers. I would make a lot of money. " And what would you do with that money? Buy a mansion. So, in one sense, it's just like the reality of the situation. kids do eventually learn that money exists and that money can get them the things they want. But there's another component of this because Daisy talks about their family struggling financially and how she hopes that this can become, you know, stable income for the family. I definitely feel for her. Again, the economy is so rough. I get it. You're struggling. And the thought of being able to stay at home, work with your family, and make easy money doing social media, again, sounds like a dream. But the fact that the pressure of this is put on her son, I don't love that. What gets me nervous right now is when will I start to see the money come in? And again, this applies to all family channels. Again, that's one of my big critiques is like the children are the money makers. I don't think that's fair. Another element is that kids do internalize ideas about money. Many kids do hear their parents talk about money or talk about struggling to pay the bills, but that really comes out in a lot of these clips where Ethan just keeps emphasizing over and over, I want a bunch of subscribers so that we can make money. What kind of videos do you want to film? I don't know. So then why do you want a YouTube channel? Because it makes money. What is your goal? My goal is to make more money. Ethan's So my question here though for Daisy would be like if you want to pursue social media, why don't you pursue it yourself? And maybe she has no interest in being an influencer. But like that's the problem is -- your kid likes YouTube and he thinks it might be fun to make some videos, but don't put the pressure on him to build a channel from zero and hopefully someday be making a ton of money. Do you know what I mean? So much of social media success does boil down to, as I mentioned, luck and privilege. So

a kid who's really trying at this and their parents are trying to push them and they're all trying to do this. If it doesn't work out, they're going to feel like they personally did something wrong when really it's like the social media landscape is so competitive and so hard to gain traction in. And that's not your fault necessarily. It's just a lot for a kid. Okay, so next up, I want to talk about all of these families responding to the haters, finally hearing them be asked like, "What do you think about, you know, mean comments or snark pages talking about family vlogging and saying it's bad? " So, let's get into that. Some people watching this are going to say it's because you exploit your kids. People that book roles in TV shows and movies and commercials, things like that, it's the exact same thing. It's just we have the production inside of our home. I'm going to say right off the bat, I hate Kyler's vibe here. The like posture that he immediately puts on, I'm just like, "Sir, calm down. " It's the exact same thing as traditional media. No, it's not. This is blurring the lines between home and work. It's family time, childhood, and performing. That's different than like being in a commercial. Some people would say that is the exact problem, though. When you're in a traditional space, it's understood that it's work, whereas this is labor without any protection or regulation. Isn't that bad? I don't necessarily think it's bad. I think as a parent, you have to see the situation. Okay, do our kids look miserable? Okay, is this a good time to film? So, to be fair, Madison then does say that she would support and go along with any regulations. Again, interestingly, Kyler does not. He doesn't say anything and then he jumps in with this. I don't feel like we're exploiting our kids. I think it's kind of a vicious cycle. I mean, you're doing it right now. I can't get over his posture and his facial expression. This is a man who's about to throw a fit. You're exploiting us and you're exploiting my kids right now for your gain. This is an interesting question. Okay. How exploitative is the documentary genre? Is there a difference between like reality TV and a documentary? I would say yes. I think there's a lot of nuance there. Not going to get into it now because we'll be here for four hours. It's a valid point. How do you feel about what we're doing? I'm allowing you to do it. it because there's a story to be told. It's like, yeah, but that goes both ways. You're allowing this documentary crew to follow you because you thought that being in this documentary would be worthwhile. Why? Probably more press. the legitimacy of being featured in a major documentary. It's not like they're getting nothing out of it. There's this later scene where Justin and Kyler are both complaining about the haters. If you dive into that stuff, like it actually just kind of messes with your brain. I can sympathize with the idea of being the target of a lot of hate or even like snark pages. I'm sure it's not great. I'm sure it feels very bad. There definitely are people who go way too far in their um hatred of various creators, but you can't write off criticism overall. Sometimes you see these negative things out there like "you're using your kids" and all this kind of stuff and -- like if they only knew -- you just want to strangle these people. Yeah. Justin, you're on camera. My god. my kids are happy. They have great childhood. (we're with them! ) Exactly. That's like such a big theme or that's like the message that both of these families try to promote is like, family vlogging is a good thing because we get to have the best job in the world. We're spending time together as a family. We're making all this money. Yeah, we get quality time with the kids. So, can't criticize us cuz we're home. That negates everything else that could potentially be bad? Listen, I get why people may have opinions of 'you're forcing this on them' or you're making your kids do that. And I also think some people feel very validated when it comes out about a certain family. Oh my gosh, those kids were locked up unless they performed. They're like, I knew it. I know. That's probably what all these creators are doing. When something as absolutely horrifying as the Franke situation comes out, many fans and viewers are concerned about what actually goes on behind closed doors. You know, obviously we see what makes it into the edited videos, but we don't know what it's like. the kids are actually experiencing. And I'm not saying that everyone is being harmed in that way, but as many like family vlogger haters say, it's like we'll wait and see when the kids get older and they can tell us how they really felt about it. But until that time comes, we're just taking the parents words. And of course, the parents tend to say, "Yeah, the kids love it. It's all good. Don't worry. " Some people might say we're making our kids work. You should not do that. That is the child ab -- blah blah blah. Let's be very clear. We're doing most of the work. My kids show up and song and dance for 25 minutes or we do a fun challenge. But who's doing the work? We're editing the videos. I'm looking at the algorithms. I'm making the thumbnails. I'm doing all the digital marketing, everything. Okay. You know what, Justin? I will agree with you. I think it is a fair point that the parents are doing the bulk of the work when it comes to this kind of operation. Either that or you're hiring someone else to handle it, whether that's like videography, lighting, editing. Though, I would still argue the trade-off is your kids privacy. your kids becoming famous before they can even understand or conceptualize social media, let alone consent to being put on display to that many people. You have over 100,000 subscribers and you don't even know what you're doing

cuz you you're just having fun with dada, right? Yeah. Give this video 50 thousand likes! And also again, even if the kids are only filming for like 20 minutes at a time here and there, that is still work. And when you're a child, most children do not work in any capacity. even if it's a relatively small portion of their day. These kids are working. Okay. I don't think that should be like minimized. But people will say, "Well, if you didn't have the kid, no one would watch your videos. " (laughing) Yeah! Absolutely. But I will say, if we weren't doing this, we'd be doing something else that I'd be equally successful in because of the drive that we have to be good at this. Our kids are happy. Leave us alone. We'll leave you alone and I'll meet you at the evolution bell curve. He thinks he just slayed us there, you know. Meet me at the evolution bell curve. I was like, "What does that mean? " Huh? Maybe I'm too dumb to understand. Next question is, "What happens to the money? Are we saving money for the kids? " Obviously, a major issue is these families are making bank off the children, off their likeness. They are the stars of the show. Is any of that money being saved for them? Is it being set aside for their future? What we're doing in the business that we've established is directly going to be our children's inheritance. As they grow older, they have a platform of people to market to. That was interesting because I think that's the first time I've heard a parent blatantly say like the inheritance is not just purely financial, but the inheritance is the business of the social media platforms. And that's interesting though that would still require the kids to continue working like take on the family business, take over control versus like, if the kids decided once they're older that they don't want to do social media, what would they be left with? I think that's a very important question and I want to hear numbers. Are you setting aside money for your children and how much? We are setting aside uh money for our kids. I have a certain amount that I think they should have by the time that they're 18 years old so they can buy a house, not so they can waste it and buy a Lamborghini or purses, but that's around $500,000. That should be enough. I'm not a fan of giving a child millions of dollars. Okay, And not to play into the phony body language analysis, but I was very interested when I watched this. I noticed that Ami seems uncomfortable. I don't know if that's with the question in general or Justin's response. I'm not going to read into that. Who knows? We didn't get to hear from her what her uh perspective is or if she agrees with that. I also wonder I'm like, okay, 500,000... obviously a ton of money. Anyone would be extremely lucky to like inherit that or have that in a trust for them. But are we talking 500,000 for each twin or each kid, including the youngest? Yeah. 500,000 each by the time they're 18. I mean, again, that's a great nest egg, but also again going back to how much they earn. If there were months that they were earning that $150,000 a month between AdSense and brand deals, or they're making 125 grand from a Nike deal, ending up with 500,000 each, even still seems pretty low to me. I don't know. It's hard to say like what the correct number is of course and that is up to a parent's discretion for the most part. But that's again why these rules and regulations can be so important because right now it's just whatever you want. Many of these kids they stop doing social media. They have nothing and that is completely unfair. We have seen many more people calling for increased regulation of child influencing. California recently added child influencers to the Coogan law. It's a California state bill that requires that 15% of the child's earnings be placed in a trust that they can access once they're adults. But for many child influencers, this sort of protection does not exist. We are relying on the morality of the parents to completely self regulate. There have been a lot of people speculating that family vloggers have left California because of that law because they're trying to, you know, run away from the regulations because they don't want to save money for the kids. I don't know if that's been proven to actually be true. Of course, you can speculate when somebody moves, you know, what their reasoning was. For the most part, a lot of those creators are more conservative anyway. They may just be escaping the liberal hell hole of California -- I love California. I miss it so much -- for more conservative places maybe that fit their lifestyle and everything more. Nashville has become a uh hot spot for more conservative influencers. No income tax is obviously a huge benefit there. But yeah, like is that influencer law the primary thing driving them away? I don't know. Next critique of family vloggers that they address is the idea of stranger danger. This came up a few times throughout the series. I don't know where the negativity is coming from and why people are so worried about kids being online. Why are people concerned? I love how frankly naive many of these parents act when they're, you know, faced with these kind of criticisms. What about online safety? What about the kids? Who's watching? Because we know that creeps are all over these kid and family pages. It's unfortunate. Of course, it's disgusting, but it's been proven.

And to pretend like that's not a factor or that's not a part of reality is naive. There's no way of going back. Kind of already just in it... Let's see how many followers you have, Cohen. 196,000! I do love the editing here, the juxtaposition. Again, the idea of making an Instagram account for my newborn seems asinine, but to be like, "Oh, cool. He has 200,000 followers. " And that's a good thing to you? And I'm not even implying that every person who follows these accounts is dangerous, but like even if you're the nicest person on earth, why do you have this parasocial relationship with a literal newborn? That's weird. And again, I feel like so many parents when I've heard them respond to this are just not concerned or maybe they can't even bear to really think about the issue because if it were me, it would drive me insane to like realize that maybe putting my kids out there publicly might be putting them in harm's way. people's concerns come from like yes, just basic privacy, and like, kids have a right to have control over their digital footprint but also again, the more information that you put out there -- all it takes is one weird fan being obsessed with you and you can have a stalker, you know let alone if you have millions of fans who are obsessed with you from the day you're born! but like even let's say these kids grow up they have their own Instagram they take control of their accounts, kids in general can be very vulnerable online and you never know who might reach out to your kids, it can be really hard for parents to know who they're talking to. Kids have been tricked or catfished. And yeah, it's just really a matter of scale because any kid online can be vulnerable to these risks. But having millions of followers makes it much much more likely that some number of those people may seek out your child in one way or another. There are a lot of people watching you guys. You ever noticed anything that is like weird even from like fans? For the most part, no... Recently on Facebook, actually, there was one comment and I was just like, "This is weird. " And on the picture of Ava, a male commented, "Please keep her safe. She's my future wife. " Please wife? If anyone said that to me about my child, I would be burning the world down. And I'm sure that's not even the worst comment or message that they've ever received on behalf of the family. It's terrifying. You're allowing and encouraging and further deepening that parasocial relationship with strangers. You don't know who's out there. my response was blocked and I went and just blocked. I have nothing to say to that. But it really doesn't happen often at all. People say things like, you know, you're putting your kids online. What if there's, you know, child predators watching? And you can't control that. It is true that you can't control necessarily who watches something when you put it out in the public. But you can control what you post to the public. You can control, keeping your kids away or more protected from that versus shoving them out into the world. So for me that's like saying, "Oh, there's, you know, bees in the world. You should never go outside. They might sting you. " Well, they're not right here. And the bee analogy, I'm like, I'm not arguing for people to be like overly paranoid or like never let their kids out into the world at all, but I think there's a healthy level of care and caution. And yes, this is a parenting decision, but like I am a parent now. I have a 9-month-old and I personally would lean pretty far on the side of caution when it comes to the internet and strangers. You know, my kids aren't affected by them right now. We're perfectly fine with protecting them in the way that we do. It's as if like it's not a real concern unless someone is literally banging down your door... which a lot of YouTubers and content creators don't actually speak about the stalkers or terrible interactions that they have because speaking about it publicly can encourage that kind of behavior. Probably every well-known and even smaller creators, almost every one of them has had some sort of a stalker or like uncomfortable fan situation. And there are people who show up at YouTubers' houses, you know, it's not unheard of. So, I understand being a parent and saying, you know, I'm going to handle my own family. I can keep them safe. But like, can you? I hope you can. click analytics and it shows you 30% male, mostly 35 to 44. Here's their dad, Justin, showing them their analytics, saying that a big portion of their audience are 30 to 40 year-old men. And the girls are shocked because, of course, they're young girls. They cater to a young female audience. Why are older men watching? Over 30% guys. That's crazy. Yes, that's crazy. And he's so nonchalant about it. Yeah that's crazy. A lot of people say this, like they say they've never been catcalled so much as when they were underage. And I can totally relate to that. Like, I started YouTube when I was literally 11 and I was posting vlogs and skits and all kinds of videos. And I never got more creepy comments and messages from men than when I was literally 12 or 13. It's gross. At the time, I would laugh at it and be like, "Ew, creepy old men. " But like as an adult now, I'm like that's actually horrifying. Looking at the girls demographic as they grow up. I have to be honest in saying I don't concern myself too much with that because I mean it's the world.

I don't concern myself with the world. Actually, I just it. Oh, okay. You're exposing them to this or people who shouldn't be looking at little girls? Maybe... but those people walk around the world every day. Those people are out in the world. Yes, that's true. And often we don't know what people are really like or who we're walking by on the street. But again to just be like, it's inevitable. It's it is what it is? Our job is to protect our children generally regardless of what's going on the internet and we keep them very close because that is our job as parents. I think the thing with these family channels, which is a central piece of beef I have, is like the foundation of their existence as creators, would be absolutely rocked if they had to actually truly reckon with this reality. So, I think they often don't really let themselves think deeply about this issue. Like, they're like, "Yeah, yeah, weirdos exist, but like it's fine. " Which like is a shocking response to me already, but I'm like, No, truly, really think about it. Think deeply and consider, is it worth having my kids out here, knowing that these people are in their audience, not knowing who those people are or if they may someday pass my child somewhere, you know? Is there not the questions of like, what if? Like what are the actual risks here? That's the wild thing is like I feel like they don't even acknowledge like yes, there's a risk. Yeah, this is a risky decision, but it's a risk that we're fine taking. I honestly would rather hear them just blatantly say that instead of being like no, it's not an issue. It very well could be an issue and you don't know it's going to be an issue until it is. But again, the foundation of family vlogging requires you being okay with putting your kids out publicly to the world. And if you decided that you weren't a fan of that anymore, you would be forced to remove your kids from the internet, which many people have done. Many creators now don't show their kids anymore, even if they used to. And I love seeing people do that because you can change your mind. It's not too late. Yes, there's tons of videos and pictures of them out there, but like you can at least stop today and at least stop continuing to expose them to more and more people. At least give them the power to later rejoin social media once they're old enough to truly consent to that and handle it themselves. Like, yeah, you can't keep your kids in a bubble. You can't protect them from every sort of harm. But all of that being said, all this talk of like we're not concerned about creeps or people in the real world, the McClures also in this series show that they threw a birthday party for their 2-year-old son and invited the public. They invited their fans. It was actually a fan-only event to come celebrate this toddler's birthday. I understand doing like meet and greets and meeting fans like at a VidCon or a convention or even like if you put together your own fan event, sure. But like choosing to have the youngest kid's birthday as the venue is like a little interesting to me. 40 kids, 60 adults, a bunch of people we don't know. Can you just explain a little bit about how you maybe vetted some of these people? Basically had like trivia questions and video questions and questions about Jersey and the family. At what age did Big Boy Jersey take his first steps? I really wanted to see who had something genuine to say... which I'm like, that's not vetting. That's just showing that like they are a fan of yours. They know a lot of information about your family, but does that mean that they're safe? Again, you don't know who's showing up to this. We're being smart. We have security coming. Um, things like that... because I mean, I'm sure everyone is innocent enough, but we have to always protect our family. That's just, you know, number one priority. I love fan conventions. I love that people are able to meet, you know, the artists and the creators that they love and get to speak with them in person and let them know how much they like their work. I get that. But I think first of all that's fine for adults, maybe okay for teenagers, but still. But like a two-year-old? And again, many of these fans were just sweeties who were like, "I'm a grandma and I miss my grandkids being young and it makes me happy to watch your kids. " Okay, sure. Again, parasocial relationship with your kid. I'd be a little weirded out, but like seems harmless, right? I just cut my television off because I want to dedicate a certain number of hours to just watching them. I raised four daughters and they're all in their 20s now. So, I miss that baby phase and it's like I'm getting it back from watching them raise their kids... and they're kind of like my kids and I really appreciate that you share them with us. Mhm. But as we've seen with like Christina Grimmie, you never know who might show up to this event and all it takes is one person. So, it's just an interesting weighing of risk factors to me. And then the poor kid while he's at this party, he wants to go home. He's tired. He's over stimulated. And they're like, "No, we got to stay here. All these people came for you. " He's 2 years old. Go back home. You hear him? I think he wants to go home. Ready? Say hi. He wants to go home. But he's having a good time. I know he is. There's a lot more that I need to skip cuz I've gone way too deep into this. But there were sections about like, you know, the stresses of the algorithm that we all

experience and chasing trends and feeling obligated to just do whatever's popular and family channels definitely experience that as well. And especially when it comes to kids trends, like you're doing all the weirdest things cuz you're like, I don't know, kids are into slime and like hidden rooms or whatever. And like a big portion of this was about pranks. The fish fam had done a bunch of pranks like pranking my husband that my water broke, which was so clearly like not even a real prank. That's my thing is I'm like, "Okay, pranks are the scourge of YouTube. " But like at least a real prank, a genuine prank where someone is actually surprised, that can be good sometimes. Okay, it can be kind of satisfying. But once you know that your family does pranks a lot, like everyone always knows that a prank is coming. And also, most of the time it's not even an actual prank. They're acting like it's a prank. And that one I'm like, Kyler and Madison, you guys were pursuing acting and you were not very good in these videos. Oh my gosh. Okay, we really need to go. Tell me where the bag's at and I'll go figure it out. Okay. What do you need? Tell me... Anyways, and it did 6. 2 million views, had 102,000 likes. So, naturally, like we want to do it again, you know, cuz we got to get the views! So, now we're going to prank the kids. But like kids don't understand what water breaking means. I've been having really bad cramps. We might need to pack a hospital bag. I think your baby brother might be coming today. If my water breaks, that means the baby's coming. It's like the kids are just confused. What was that? Did my water just break? You guys, the baby's coming out, in my backyard! Then the McClures had also, you know, dipped their toes into pranks. There was a prank going around arguing in front of our kids. And so today's video is going to be me disrespecting Ami to get the kids reaction. Love that concept. Hilarious. So they stage this argument in front of the girls and the girls get upset and they're like, "Is this real? Please tell us. " It seems like I'm the only one in this family working hard doing things. Three bozos right here. Especially that one right there. (Is this real... is this real? ) It's very real. This is pissing me off so much. I have another girlfriend. Looks better than your mom. She's smarter than your mom. And then eventually the kids get upset because they're confused. They're used to filming and they know cameras are set up, but the line between real and fake is confusing, especially for a child. Are we filming? Are we acting? You don't know what's genuine or what's scripted, especially when you're pranking your own kids. So then they turned it into a family lesson that it's wrong to prank your kids or lie to your kids. And um... Why did he do that? I think that he thought that it might be a good video, I don't think he expected you guys to be upset like that. (I don't like the video) I understand that. (It's the worst thing ever. ) Don't do pranks anymore. We won't do those types of pranks ever again, okay? So finally we get to the end of this and a big remaining question is, what happens when the kids of family channels grow up? Everybody loves a toddler. They're hilarious. They say the darndest things. But that's like the peak of cuteness on family channels. As they get older, a lot of times the audience gets less interested. You know, oh, who wants to watch an 8-year-old? No offense to the 8-year-olds! but you can focus on the younger and younger kids, but eventually you stop having kids and all the kids start to grow up and you think, hm, our views are dropping. What next? I found that what's his name? Not Ryder. What's his name? Kyler. Dad Kyler is pursuing a country music career. And I wanted to laugh at it at first, but then I realized I'm like, you know what? People pursuing art is cool. All right. Is it a genuine passion or is it just another like cash grab? I don't know. But like I don't WANT to make fun of people for pursuing music. But then I found that Cole Labrant from the Labrant family is also pursuing music kind of right now. He made a song called Swag Daddy. And I definitely want to make fun of that. I'm like, you know what? If it's just you do it. Whatever these parents want to pursue, that's great. Another major thing that these parents obviously do is they try to launch businesses. Everybody knows that YouTubers try to move beyond just YouTube. You want to do bigger and better things. The Fish Fam have created drink blocks, which is flavored water for kids in these stackable buildable containers in case you would like to start hoarding your kids trash. Snuggle gloves that are a toy, but really like a pillow on a glove. I don't know the point of that but their biggest venture so far is Wittles, which is a "healthy" chocolate milk. Then with the McClures, Ami started a skincare brand called Gleam Beauty and Justin invented the Ultralite, which is like a little light that goes on your tripod for filming and it's been backed by Daymond from Shark Tank. That's cool. You know, I totally support people looking into new ventures. Final thoughts. Overall, I enjoyed this series. I don't think it gave as many like shocking revelations as I would like to see, but that's probably like more realistic.

We didn't really get to see like the long-term impact from the kids themselves because the kids are still pretty young. Ava and Alexis are I think they just turned 12 and then Tatum and Oakley are I believe 8 years old, so they're still pretty young. Um though the McClure twins have started to like become a lot more active in the social media work and I think they have a better understanding of it now. Still though, I really do think it takes waiting until kids are a lot older and maybe even removed from the social media situation for them to be able to reflect and think about how they actually feel. And I'm sure their feelings change over time. I'm sure there are good happy memories. I'm sure they enjoyed making bank, but I assume that there's very complicated feelings when it comes to the experience of being raised online from the time that you were at least like a toddler. There's also a question of like how will the kids react once they are able to read comments. for a long time, parents can protect the kids from that like, they're not able to look at it or they're not allowed to read comments but eventually you will or like kids at school will show you things or tell you what people are maybe saying about your family online -- which is really difficult as a kid, even as an adult. I'm like couldn't this documentary just wait five more years and we could get like a full 10 year span. Let's just do Boyhood, but like family vlogger version, right? Then to wrap up, Daisy and Ethan, the aspiring family vloggers. Spoiler, their channel did not blow up. I think they made like, you know, 5 to 10 videos. So, I wouldn't say that's enough to like build momentum and potentially gain a following, but by the end, Ethan didn't want to do social media anymore, and he was kind of embarrassed about his old videos. But the mom, frustratingly, Daisy, is still like, "Oh, I really hope Ethan would get back into it. Oh, maybe our younger kid can do social media. " It's like, hello, lady. Like, again, if you want to do this, make your own channel. Stop forcing it on the kids. They don't want to do it. Ethan even specifically asked his mom to delete the old videos because he's embarrassed about them and she wouldn't. And I think that's pretty uncool. Like, even though he's only like 10 or 11, I think. I think it's important to listen to your kids's wishes, especially on a channel that has like basically no followers anyway. It's like you don't have anything to lose. You don't have to delete the videos. You can private them. you can save them for yourselves, but like I don't know why you would keep that public if that would potentially hurt your kid and make them feel bad. So, that is that. I hope you enjoyed today's video. Thank you to the Born to Be Viral team for reaching out to me. It was a -- It was very cool to be asked my perspective on a couple of these things. Also, oh my god, I forgot to mention my haircut. My haircut's kind of [ __ ] up, actually. This is not at all what I asked for. It wasn't meant to look like this, but it's fine. Hair grows. Okay. And thank you again to Ritual for sponsoring today's video. You can click the link in the description to check them out. Last thing, I want to promote uh my latest videos because the algorithm is tough and we are all struggling in the attention economy. If you haven't seen my last few uploads, please consider checking them out. A couple of them are close to 200,000 and that'd be great if we could break through there. I've covered millennial optimism, irony, and cringe, ChatGPT, and my last video was about how motherhood should radicalize you. essentially about how being a mother and a parent in the United States is absolutely insane and I don't know how we survive. My silver lining is that other countries are able to take better care of people and I believe that we can someday too. Okay. Always got to believe in a better future otherwise I will just implode. K thanks bye!