Inside the Multibillion-Dollar Business of Child Influencers

Fortesa Latifi
Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:59:09 +0000
Child, Children, Kids, Influencer, Vlog, Youtube, Tiktok, Danger, Money, Business, Excerpt

What is it like to live your entire life in front of an audience of millions — from your birth to potty-training to puberty to adolescence? For many child influencers, this is their reality. They are public figures before they are even born; both the milestones and the mundane moments of their lives are captured by their parents and sold as content. Though child influencers — and the mom influencers and family vloggers who prop them up — are part of the multibillion dollar influencing industry, until now, we haven’t known much about what it was like to be one. That’s what I’m changing with my book Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online. To answer these questions, I talked to kid influencers themselves, family vloggers, experts in the industry, digital ethicists, psychologists, and more.

A factor that can’t be ignored when it comes to child influencers is the staggering amounts of money that can be made in this industry. When we discuss why parents put their children’s entire lives on the internet, money is a big part of the answer. Though I’ve been reporting on the child influencer industry for years, I still found myself shocked by what I uncovered in this chapter of my book, where I dug into the amount of money parents and their kids are making.

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IN HER BEST YEAR AS A FAMILY vlogger, Rossanna Burgos and her family made $1 million. It all started 10 years ago, when Rossanna’s husband posted Vine videos with their two young children that went viral. Rossanna (known to fans as Mama Bee) remembers asking her husband why so many people were watching. “He said, ‘People love us. They see themselves in us.’” Once their content started taking off, Rossanna’s husband Andrés (known online as Papa Bee) made the family YouTube and Instagram accounts. They now have 10.4 million YouTube subscribers and 1.9 million Instagram followers.

The Bee children, Gabriela and Roberto, were around nine and 10 years old when the family started creating content. The kids loved making videos with their parents, Mama Bee says. Their most popular video of all time has 106 million views and features Papa Bee placing covered plates in front of the kids who play rock-paper-scissors to determine who is going to eat a gummy food version of the real food the other one is going to eat. Roberto wins and chooses a covered plate that turns out to hold a gummy hamburger. Both kids cheer and bite into their burgers. The video continues with several more rounds of rock-paper-scissors and gummy foods including peppers, soda, and pizza.

Within a couple of years, the Bee family was approached for brand deals. Their first, Mama Bee remembers, paid them $500, which seemed “unbelievable” at the time. Outside of YouTube, Mama Bee worked in pharmaceuticals, and Papa Bee worked in market research, both netting six-figure salaries. As their platform continued to grow, there came a moment of reckoning. “And so my husband and I had a very serious conversation of, ‘We don’t want to look back when we’re 90 years old and say, I wonder what would have happened if we had [gone] all in.’” So they quit their jobs and dedicated themselves to YouTube. It took a few years before their new career exceeded their previous salaries, but in their best year, they made “in the vicinity of one million [dollars].”

Mama Bee says, “It’s amazing, but it can be very dangerous in the wrong hands. I have seen a lot of families sacrificing the well-being of their family, of their morals in order to try to chase that.” Her heart breaks for kids who were born with cameras in their faces or for kids shown in vulnerable moments. Mama Bee sees herself as distinct from these kinds of creators. A quick scroll through the Bee Family’s content shows videos mostly focused on challenges and skits; there aren’t videos about the children going through puberty or struggles they had in school.

Mama Bee doesn’t want to be seen as a family vlogger, because she thinks of family vloggers as people who vlog every single moment “from morning to night, hoping to capture something that will stand out” as opposed to the more challenge-focused and scripted content on her channel. Meeting other vloggers at creator conventions like VidCon solidified her view. “We’ve met a family where their daughter pulls her hair out of her head because the parents have a camera in her face at all times, hoping they’ll capture something witty and funny and clever,” she says. I ask her how she heard about the girl pulling her hair out, and Mama Bee says the girl’s mother told her in a very “matter-of-fact” way. “You’re focusing on dollar figures, you’re focusing on likes, you’re focusing on comments.”

In our conversation, I get the sense that YouTube and content creation have left the Bee Family behind. “It’s not what it used to be,” Rossanna says. “Thanks to MrBeast, where he made videos of such tremendous — I’ll use the word sensationalism — ‘I bought an island and I bought an airplane, and I did this.’ You can’t compete with that. And that’s when we decided to take a pause.”

In February of 2024, the Bee Family posted a video titled “Why Our Family Changed,” which currently has only 129,000 views.

“Sensationalism killed the creator,” Rossanna says while sitting next to Papa Bee. The couple goes on to explain that they’re stepping back from constant content creation, but viewers should keep up with their kids, Gabriela and Roberto, who are growing their music careers. (A quick check shows that Gabriela has 10.9 million TikTok followers and Roberto has 246,000.) The family also creates Roblox games, which gives them another stream of income.

Mama Bee tells me that each of their children have money saved in a trust. How much? I ask. She’s evasive, calling it a “good chunk of change.” “I hate to push,” I say, “but I have to ask. Is it hundreds of thousands? Is it millions? What are we talking?”

“I would say millions,” Rossanna says.

So yes, she says. If given the chance, she would do it all again.

CLARISSA LASKEY, A FORMER mom influencer turned influencer marketing manager, told me that she is astounded by the amount of money influencers make, every single day. “In a giant program we just ran, a creator was paid over $150,000 for one TikTok post.” Brandon Stewart, the founder of Brandon Studios and a former producer at AwesomenessTV, tells me he worked with kid influencers who would make $100,000 a month.

How do influencers make their boatloads of money? For the answer to that question, I reached out to Brendan Gahan, the CEO of the influencer marketing agency Creator Authority. Gahan, who has worked in the industry for 15 years, sends me an email of notes he’s written up for me to look over.

First, Gahan’s email explains, there’s income from the platforms themselves: the TikTok Creator Fund, which pays creators who have more than 10,000 followers for eligible views on videos longer than a minute, and YouTube Adsense, a program through which eligible YouTube creators are given a 45 ⁄ 55 split in ad revenue in favor of the creator. They’re paid based on the CPM, which refers to the cost per 1,000 impressions. Basically: A creator gets a cut of what advertisers pay when an ad is placed on their video (though not all videos have ads and not all views are eligible for payment).

The Family Fun Pack, a YouTube family with 10.4 million subscribers, has over 15 billion lifetime views. By the time I speak to Gahan, they’ve netted 89 million views in the previous 30 days. Gahan looks over their data while we’re chatting, calling their billions of lifetime views impressive. I ask him to take a shot in the dark on how much money the Family Fun Pack is making per month just on YouTube from AdSense. “I would think $200,000,” he says. “A month?” I ask. Yes, he says.

The second way creators make money is through brand deals and sponsored content. Brand deals are the largest source of income for creators, according to the Goldman Sachs Creator Economy Report. “Amongst creators as a whole, this is still the bulk of where they generate their income,” Gahan says. “It powers most of the creator economy.” I scroll through my Instagram feed and happen upon a sponsored post from @maiaknight (1.6 million followers on Instagram, 7.6 million on TikTok) for Dove skin products (#GetCozyWithDove). When I ask Gahan how much he thinks Knight was paid for the ad, he notes that she’s repped by Digital Brand Architects, a firm he considers to only represent premium influencers. His guess for the 30-second Dove Instagram ad is that Knight made around $50,000 though he wouldn’t be surprised if the profit reached up to $100,000. And it’s not only influencers who have millions of followers who are raking in the money on brand deals. A mom influencer who has just over 500,000 Instagram followers told me she made over $300,000 through brand deals in the last year. “But the year before that wasn’t even close to half of that so every year is different,” she adds.

The third way creators make money is through their own products or businesses. “More and more creators are attempting to use their platforms to launch their own companies,” Gahan says. I think of the teen mom TikTok creator who launched her own boutique after gaining millions of TikTok followers or the family vloggers who sell merchandise with their kids’ faces on it. The biggest creators lend their faces to products, like the Ryan’s World-branded toys in Target or Walmart.

Fourth, Gahan says, big creators do appearances, speaking engagements, or conferences, for which they are paid (though this seems to be the least common way for creators to make money).

And fifth, the largest creators can even be acquired, invested in, or given equity in larger companies. Shay Carl Butler was one of the first family vloggers with his channel The Shaytards. Butler had millions of subscribers when he cofounded Maker Studios, a production company that was eventually acquired by Disney for $550 million, a deal for which Butler was rumored to have made $20 million.

Then there’s affiliate links. According to the people I spoke with, the whole industry is shifting toward sites such as Like To Know It (also known as LTK), where influencers gain commission by providing links to every item of clothing they’re wearing and the products they are using.

“There’s crazy, crazy amounts of money,” Tyler Chou, an attorney for YouTube creators, says of affiliate links. “Being a family influencer is the best because as the mom, you can do everything, right? You can do fashion, you can do home goods, you can do all the kids’ foods. All foods, all foods basically you can touch. You can do kitchen appliances, you can do furniture. Of all the creators, I think being a family channel is probably the most profitable.”

From the beginning of your transition from an influencer to a mom influencer or a vlogger to a family vlogger, there are so many sponsorship and affiliate opportunities. Trying to get pregnant? Do a Modern Fertility brand deal detailing how you’re tracking your cycle. At the point of taking pregnancy tests? There’s a Clearblue sponsorship waiting for you. Packing your hospital bag? Link to everything you’re bringing and swim in the affiliate cash. And then when the baby is born? The opportunity for content explodes — you can link to your favorite diaper brand and do sponsorship deals for baby clothes and bottles and formula.

As the kids grow, so do the opportunities for commissionable content — you can link to sippy cups and front-facing strollers and your favorite toddler outfits. You can set up brand deals for their supposed favorite snacks or Target-sponsored back-to-school shopping trips. And it’s not only kid-specific stuff — moms can do deals for any product related to running a household which is, uh, almost every product. I once saw a mom influencer make a sponsored post for batteries. “You can literally do anything,” Chou says. “Everything can be touched with a family channel.”

ONCE VLOGGERS AND INFLUENCERS start to make real money, says Anthony Ambriz, a YouTube strategist in Utah, they offload the work of their channel — and household. “They hire editors from the Philippines to cover editing and channel management,” Ambriz says. “They have videographers, household managers, nannies, housekeepers, managers for brand sponsorships.” Ambriz used to hold creator meet-ups where prominent family vloggers would get together to discuss the best strategies and content ideas. At one of these meetings, Ambriz and a vlogger dad were preparing a presentation to give to the rest of the group; Ambriz asked the dad what he thought the title of the presentation should be. The dad’s suggestion? “How to get rich exploiting your kids.”

Among vlogging families, it’s common knowledge what type of content does best, Ambriz says, including content where a child is sick or hurt and content surrounding a pregnancy or the arrival of a new baby. “There was that jealousy, where someone would be like ‘I’m not growing as fast, but they are. Their kid keeps getting sick, of course they’re going to grow.’”

It’s not only sick kid content that does well — generally, content with children tends to do better than content without children. Clarissa Laskey, former mom blogger turned social media marketing manager, says she noticed this herself when she was a mom creator. If she was traveling without her kids, people would always comment asking where they were. And when she posted with them, those posts did better than her solo posts. Research backs Laskey up: Pew Research Center found that YouTube videos that featured a child or children under the age of thirteen were substantially more popular than videos that didn’t feature children.

Because of her past as a mom influencer and her present as an influencer marketing expert, Laskey is the perfect person to ask the question I’ve always wanted to know the answer to: How much money are these people actually making? For YouTube creators with 10 million subscribers, Laskey estimates they’re making between $5 million and $8 million annually between YouTube ad revenue and sponsored posts. Even people with only 500,000 subscribers can make $6,000 a month on ads alone.

Laskey estimates that Maia Knight, a 28-year-old mom of twin daughters Violet and Scout, who has 7.7 million followers on TikTok, could be “in that $3-million-to-$5-million range a year annually,” she said. Knight no longer shows her daughters’ faces on any social media platform, which she called “a choice to protect [them]” in a TikTok video explaining the decision. According to Laskey, almost all creators who historically showed their kids online and then decided to take them off made less money after taking their kids offline. How much money were they losing? I ask. “Half,” she says. And sometimes the reality can be even more stark than that. A source I interviewed for a story for The Washington Post, Grant Khanbalinov, the dad behind @lifeofbreaandgrant on TikTok (3.1 million followers) told me that once he stopped showing his kids in content, he went from making $100,000 a year in sponsored content to “pretty much zero. Since we stopped, we’ve gotten one brand deal in the last year,” Khanbalinov told me. “There’s no amount of money that someone could pay me right now to say, ‘Hey, put your kids in a video right now for TikTok.’”

“It becomes this joke of, should we have a kid so we can start growing [our channel]?”

Katie Beach, a mom influencer with nearly 150,000 followers on Instagram and 114,000 followers on TikTok, doesn’t show her kids online. If her toddlers are in her videos, they’re filmed from the back or side. “I hate the idea of strangers being able to recognize my child,” Beach says. But that protective instinct has cost her. “I’ve turned down numerous five-figure brand deals because I wouldn’t show my children,” she says. “I’ve had diaper brands, for example — not only would I not show my kids, I would never show my kids in a diaper. There are baby food companies who want to show your kids eating, which is another thing I would never do. And just so many toy companies that want to show your kids playing with the toy.” She’ll offer to do the ad without her kids, “and brands pass,” she says.

Though more mom influencers are choosing to keep their kids offline in recent years, some brands just aren’t open to ads or sponsored content that doesn’t feature children, says Monica Banks, the founder of Gugu Guru, a marketing firm that connects mom influencers with paid opportunities. And for brands, there’s no lack of creators to pull from. “There are still plenty of moms who are okay with showing their kids in the content,” Banks says.

Ambriz also mentions that pregnancy and newborn content can be particularly lucrative. “And then it becomes this joke of, should we have a kid so we can start growing [our channel]?” Ambriz says. “I think it’s a joke that sometimes stems from reality.”

Laskey, the mom blogger turned marketing manager, addresses this oft-repeated rumor — that vloggers and influencers have kids specifically to create content. “I hate to say this, but over the years, I’ve known people who have had more children because those brand deals are really lucrative.” It stops me in my tracks: “Is that true?” I ask. “I’ve definitely been in circles with certain influencers [where they’re] all of a sudden adding a fourth or fifth child. Or before their baby’s even here, they already have brand deals lined up and what they can get and how they can get their nursery paid for now.”

I ask her how explicit the thinking of the influencers is. Is it literally, I need to have another kid because it is good for business? “That is definitely a thing,” Laskey says. “It’s a thing of saying, ‘You know what? This was a great ride. Now my kid is six years old and no one cares as much. You know, maybe we should have another baby and get these brand deals going.’” She continues, “I personally don’t think it’s great because those little kids that you have with the great brand deal, they grow up and those deals go away and now you’re still raising a child.” But while it’s good, it can be great. “There are family vloggers that live in gated communities next to NBA players and CEOs of airlines,” Ambriz says. According to Dani Abraham, who used to be the senior manager of talent partnerships at AwesomenessTV, a media company that cultivated kids’ YouTube channels, “These kids would rake in $100,000 a month.”

When we talk about the family vlogging industry and what it’s like to be an influencer kid, we need to talk about the money. This is life-changing money. I know there’s a bleak lens through which to view this: Parents are exploiting the privacy of their children in exchange for cash. In some cases, that might be true but that’s not the whole story, and ignoring the complexities of this industry doesn’t do the kids at the center of it any justice. I think of Bethanie Johnson of @thegarciadiaries, with 322,000 followers on Instagram, who makes about $500,000 a year. Though she’s considered pulling back from influencing, she knows there’s no other job in which a single mother of five with only a high school education could make half a million dollars a year.

Or MariClare, a teen mom who has 2.2 million followers on TikTok, who makes between $10,000 and $30,000 a month, and tells me she’s never had a job outside of content creation besides briefly waiting tables.

One family vlogger told me they netted about $360,000 in their best year; before family vlogging, they were living paycheck to pay- check.

Kaci, who with her husband, Casey (yes, both their names are Casey, and they’re high school sweethearts) has 1.6 million followers on TikTok, didn’t reveal exactly how much money the family makes but offered the information that her husband was an exterminator before they took off on social media. When their account first went viral, they were making “three times that. Now it’s a whole different world to us.” I ask her what that freedom feels like. “Honestly, it’s nice not to have to worry about bills or food. There was a time when we had to choose between getting gas in our car or paying a bill. It’s so nice not to have to deal with that anymore.”

Adrea Garza, the mom behind @garzacrew with 5.2 million Tik-Tok followers, features the lives of her twin eight-year-old daughters Haven and Koti. When Adrea found out she was pregnant with twins, she realized that if she continued to work, her entire paycheck would go to daycare costs. Instead, she decided to stay home. Now, five years after her daughters first went viral, the girls’ social media presence is Adrea’s full-time job. “I’m constantly on the phone, Zoom calls, talking to friends to brainstorm ideas for content, talking with our accountants, our managers, my attorney. My day is pretty much spent managing this Garza Crew media company that I’ve now created.” Adrea estimates that this year, she and her daughters will rake in somewhere between “$500,000 and $1 million, just depending on how the year shakes out.”

Though influencing is a global career, it seems to me a uniquely American pursuit. It appeals to the best parts of the American Dream, the ones we can’t help wanting to believe in: that anyone can be a success and have the white picket fence house and three-car garage to show for it. In a country where economic stability feels so precarious and increasingly unreachable for all but the wealthiest among us, is it any wonder Americans are taking their turn playing the viral lottery? In late-stage capitalism, where everything is a commodity, including you and your child, there’s a part of me that understands trading privacy for economic stability.

In an ideal world, childhood would be sacred, existing outside of the bounds of being turned into profit. But we’re not in that world — we’re in this one, where there are fewer and fewer paths to the ever-shrinking middle class, where childcare costs often outpace a parent’s entire salary, where student and medical debt continues to balloon — and where one sponsorship can net more than the average salary. I wonder if, when people rage against influencer parents, what they’re really raging against is the system that offers so few opportunities for advancement besides the commodification of the self. All you have to do is post.

Copyright © 2026 by Fortesa Latifi. From the forthcoming book LIKE, FOLLOW, SUBSCRIBE:
Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online by Fortesa Latifi to be published by Gallery
Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC. Printed by permission.