Eight-year-old Ryan has emerged as the highest-earning YouTuber for 2019, a feat he has achieved for the second year in a row.
Ryan, of Ryan’s World, who reviews toys earned $26m (£20m) in 2019, up from $22m in 2018, according to an annual top-10 ranking by Forbes, based on estimated earnings between June 2018 and June 2019.
In second place is YouTube account Dude Perfect with$20m and Nastya came in third place, with $18m.
Also, between them, the 10 highest-paid YouTubers of 2019 earned $162m.
Dude Perfect features five friends in their 30s playing with toys such as Nerf guns and attempting various trick shots.
The Nastya channel features Anastasia Radzinskaya, who was born in southern Russia with cerebral palsy.
And Jeffree Star’s account has dozens of videos of him giving makeup tutorials.
According to Forbes, their estimated pre-tax income comes from advertisements, sponsored content, merchandise sales and tours.
Ryan lives with his mother, father and twin sisters in Texas. On his YouTube platform, he daily posts a new video to his 22.9 million subscribers. They frequently receive millions of hits – and a couple have more than a billion.
Last month, Ryan in an interview said that people liked his videos because he was “entertaining and funny”.
Ryan’s most popular video, which has 1.9 billion views, is a five minute 56-second clip of him running around on an inflatable in his garden, retrieving plastic eggs with toys inside.
The top earner, whose estimated earnings doubled from 2017 to 2018, has rebranded his account from Ryan ToysReview to Ryan’s World since last year’s ranking.
Chris Stoker-Walker who is an internet culture writer and the author of the book YouTubers said that Ryan is something of an outlier.
Speaking with the BBC, Stoke-Walker said, “The vast majority of people who start a YouTube channel or engage in any career as influencers.
“96.5% of YouTubers don’t make enough from advertising revenue alone to break the US poverty line – and with the number of creators on the platform constantly increasing, the competition is only getting tougher.”
YouTube videos with children in them receive three times more views on average than other types of videos from high-subscriber channels, according to a study from the US think tank the Pew Research Centre.
