That was fascinating--thanks for sharing. Really depressing as well when I consider I will never make that amount doing my day job :)
What I'm racking my brain on is three things:
1. How are these videos getting around and who is the primary audience watching them? Is it really children? Or is it the ASMR crowd who are just sitting there entranced and racking up the video ad view count?
2. What sort of video ads are generating the majority of revenue on these? Hitting a child demographic might produce some juicy CPMs.
3. How did they get started and get their first viewers? What sort of active promotion do they do?
I know why you're asking those questions. We all want to earn millions from doing little work.
Without a doubt I think luck is involved for these to go viral initially. There's no magic formula. For every lucky multi-million viewer channel with this sort of content, there's a thousand others who aren't so lucky no matter how hard they try.
The perfect storm of internal and external mentions and sharing strikes the right balance, propelling a few lucky channels above the foam to the very top. Once there, all that's needed is to keep making those videos.
I actually have no plans to take a stab at the world of Youtube stardom--I'm just not a performer in that regard.
I'm a senior digital media guy so I'm more curious about it from an advertising/audience/CPM standpoint TBH.
I understand luck is a large factor, but the barrier to entry for this seems to be pretty nails, a soothing voice, and the ability to film yourself opening a box of kids toys and putting them back in. The more interesting part of it is the marketing side frankly, which entails how they built their viewership, what they do to actively promote it, etc.
I'm guessing that has more to do with the novelty factor. Small children fall prey to those types of psychological tricks quite easily... I'd really think twice before letting a toddler on the internet.
I think that's true, certainly to a degree: Perhaps the subject matter is a bit more detailed (or unusual) but at a higher level it's not much different.
I can't tell you how many hours I've wasted in the evenings watching things on Youtube that are probably a waste of time but I find fascinating nevertheless. PilotsTubeHD is a fun channel for watching pilots doing their thing. I also can't stop watching bosnianbill's endless lock picking videos. Maybe there's something wrong with me. :)
That sounds like a 3yr old version of csgo crate opening, which is the expensive digital equivalent, yet often takes over the csgo stream section of twitch.
My 3-year-old daughter likes to watch endless YouTube videos of surprise eggs being opened. Live coding is not too different in spirit.