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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.