He Got Famous at 3. How Does a YouTube Superstar Grow Up?

I
remember I had a tablet,” 12-year-old Ryan Kaji says, recounting his earliest memory. “I was just clicking, scrolling, watching videos. I was a little kid, maybe three years old.”

His father, Shion Kaji, chuckles. “Before you even knew how to type, you had an iPad,” he says.

“You don’t remember anything else?” his mother, Loann Kaji, gently prods. “Getting a dog?”

“What about the first toy you played with?” his father asks.

Kaji screws up his face in concentration. “I remember a video I made where I was playing with a train set,” he says.

“It was a Thomas the Tank Engine,” one of his younger sisters chimes in. “You were, like, two years old.” (It was actually a Lego train set.)

“It’s funny,” Shion says. “Sometimes they’ll watch Ryan’s videos while they’re sitting right next to Ryan.”

We’re on the patio at a boutique hotel in Culver City, California, with Kaji, his parents, and his eight-year-old twin sisters, Emma and Kate. Shion and Loann have flown in from Hawaii, where they live, and Kaji and his sisters have traveled from summer camp in New York state. He’s here to present at the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards, and also for his first press junket, to promote his feature-length movie, Ryan’s World the Movie: Titan Universe Adventure, which will be released on more than 2,100 screens across North America on Aug. 16.

For the past nine years, Kaji has been perhaps the most famous child on the internet, or at least among the most monetizable. His main channel, Ryan’s World, has more than 37 million subscribers and more than 50 billion views; the family has since launched a gaming channel (3 million subscribers), a Spanish-language channel (4 million), and a channel devoted to the animated adventures of Emma and Kate (800,000 subscribers). Kaji has worked with sponsors such as Mattel, Lunchables, Nintendo, and the Los Angeles Police Department. His TV show, Ryan’s Mystery Playdate, ran on Nickelodeon for four seasons, from 2019 until 2023. On Amazon, there are toothbrushes, bedsheets, plastic eggs, monster trucks, robots, and paper plates with Kaji’s adorable little face on them. According to The New York Times, in 2021, Ryan’s World-branded merchandise made more than $250 million.

Kaji is far and away the most beloved kids’ YouTuber — at least among children between the ages of three and nine, according to internal market research conducted by Amanda Klecker, senior vice president of marketing and franchise for the management company Pocket.watch, which has worked with the family since 2017. “He has charisma, he’s engaging,” she says. “Kids are really just drawn to him.”

Ryan’s World the Movie marks a turning point in both Kaji’s career and the evolution of the YouTuber ecosystem: According to his team, it is the first time a YouTube channel has been expanded into a feature-length film. In a kids’ entertainment landscape, where YouTubers like MrBeast (whom Kaji adores) arguably have higher name recognition than brands like Disney and Nickelodeon, Kaji reigns supreme.

“Years ago, kids wanted to be president, or they wanted to be movie stars,” says Klecker. “Now, they want to be creators.”

IT’S EASY TO SEE what kids find so appealing about Kaji’s content. It’s a world of bright colors, loud noises, and instant gratification, where families take trips to Legoland and Disney World, toys are concealed in every nook and cranny, and parents are always willing to play with you. (Shion and Loann are omnipresent in Kaji’s content, dressing up in goofy costumes or presenting him with toys, and it’s not lost on me how powerful that must be for a generation whose parents often resort to YouTube as a distraction for their kids.) But children invariably grow up, and when I meet Kaji, he’s not an apple-cheeked toddler but a rangy-limbed, floppy-haired preteen. As his audience grows up, too, the nagging question is how he’ll be able to do so along with them.

To hear his parents tell it, the family stumbled into YouTube superstardom by chance. Loann emigrated from Vietnam when she was six, while Shion came from Japan at 15; Loann was a high school chemistry teacher, and Shion a structural engineer when they had Ryan. Because he was born in 2011 — part of the first wave of Generation Alpha, a cohort in which nearly 40 percent have used a smart device by the time they turn four — he spent a lot of time on his iPad. “We don’t do screen-time regulations,” Loann says, laughing. “I know I shouldn’t say that out loud. But we don’t.”

As a toddler, Kaji spent hours watching YouTube. “Back then, a lot of the content was unboxing toys and playing with toys,” Shion says, turning to Kaji. “And that’s where you got inspiration and wanted to start your own channel.”

Privacy was not much of a concern at first. “We never thought it would go this big,” Loann says. “We thought it’d be kind of this fun project among family in Japan and Vietnam, so they could see Ryan’s daily life.” It wasn’t until 2015, with a clip of the then-four-year-old retrieving toy cars from a giant papier-mâché egg, that the channel truly blew up, the video amassing more than a billion views to date; by the time Kaji was six, Loann and Shion had quit their jobs and founded their own production company, fielding offers from brands like Lego and Walmart.

Not everyone was a fan. Some online expressed concern about how young Kaji was, questioning whether a three-year-old could consent to appearing in front of millions of people on the internet. This critique sets Shion on the defensive. “I want to ask them, ‘When would be the ideal age where kids are able to provide full consent?’” he says. “To me, it’s beneficial for kids to start early, so they’re adapted to this nature of our society.”

Other concerns about Ryan’s World have focused on the content itself. In 2019, amid a larger crackdown on marketing to kids online, Truth in Advertising (TINA) filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission accusing Ryan’s World of targeting preschoolers. “At that age, children really shouldn’t be marketed to,” says Bonnie Patten, executive director of TINA. “They just don’t have the capability to understand [the] persuasive intent.” (Klecker says the channel is fully compliant with current advertising standards: “As an industry, we always want to be ahead of that line to make sure that we’re doing the most we can be doing to both protect the kids and their kid audiences.”)

Ryan’s World has since moved on to more general kids’ content, including science explainers, vlogs, and tutorials. They’ve also pivoted from pushing other toy brands to selling their own products. In the Pocket.watch office, there are dozens of such toys: Cap’n Ryan’s Mega Mystery Treasure Chest, a pirate-themed play set only available at Target; a 10-piece Surprise Door toy pegged to Ryan’s Mystery Playdate; a giant pineapple Mystery Egg, gifted to Kaji following a brand collab with Dole. I ask Kaji if he still plays with any of them. “Not as much,” he says. “But I did a lot when I was a kid.” These days, he’s more into gaming, though he’ll still “play Nerf with my friends if they come over and stuff.”

I can’t say I find out much about Kaji during our time together. I learn he likes tennis and anime, and he attends a private school, where he is enrolled in after-school lessons in Japanese and improv. There are only a few times I see him light up: when he interacts with his sisters, affectionately hugging them or mussing up their hair; and when he tells me about an upcoming lake swim to girls’ camp. “They said the boys were two times faster last year,” he says excitedly.

The chasm between preteen Kaji and the wide-eyed, enthusiastic toddler on his YouTube channel is both immense and very much expected for someone who became famous when most kids are just grasping the concept of the past tense. “His voice has gotten deeper. He’s even taller than Loann now,” Shion says. “That comes as a shock to a lot of people. They always view him as five or six years old.” But if you look at his main channel, much of the content is recycled from when Kaji was little, and even some videos that were shot more recently feature thumbnails of a younger him. Loann says this is to minimize Kaji’s onscreen time, so he can focus on school and his extracurriculars, and that they only record for about an hour a week. Shion adds: “Kids still like watching Ryan when he was little. But they also want to see the current Ryan.”

Over the past few years, the popularity of the Ryan’s World franchise has been declining. Though Kaji was named Forbes’ top-earning YouTuber in 2020, he fell down to Number 17 just three years later. Monthly views have also been declining slightly since early 2022, according to data from SocialBlade. “Numbers are gonna fluctuate,” Klecker says. “But I think that people just continue to really engage with his brand and are watching him in other spaces now,” citing nearly 35 million downloads of a Ryan’s World-branded mobile game as an example.

Kaji’s parents have a wide range of strategies for adapting to this shift, including placing more focus on Emma and Kate, and putting out more animated content featuring characters in the Ryan’s World universe, including Red Titan, Kaji’s superhero alter ego. Generally speaking, the plan seems to be to transition Kaji from a kiddie influencer into more of a savvy older-sibling figure.

“Back when he was the same age group as his fans, most of them [said] stuff [like], ‘Oh, I’m Ryan’s best friend,’” says Shion. “Now, they’re looking up to Ryan.” In real life, Kaji seems to very much fit this role: “The twins get into a lot of arguments, and whenever he hears crying or screaming, Ryan is always the first person to be there to help,” Loann says. For now, Kaji seems OK with this. “It’s pretty cool that people look up to me,” he says.

Loann and Shion say that if Kaji ever wanted to take a break from the channel, they would make sure he felt comfortable enough to say so. “If they don’t want to continue, we can always stop,” says Shion. They say they make sure that Kaji pursues his own passions independent of the front-facing family brand. Occasionally, he makes content that he doesn’t publicly post. He’s interested in becoming an animator when he grows up, and at one point, Shion mentions that doing a press junket like the one for the Ryan’s World movie might be a good experience for him, in terms of learning how to market and promote his content. But Kaji isn’t really thinking about that now. He doesn’t sketch his own character or anyone in the Ryan’s World universe; he mostly draws fight scenes. He just enjoys the process of building something slowly, frame by frame — something that’s just for him and not his fans. “I want to draw because it’s fun,” he says. “And once you’re done, you see the whole thing.”