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Evan Lee was in elementary school when he became the linchpin of his family’s business. With his neatly combed hair and dimpled smile, he was a charm bomb, conveying on camera both the cheerful sincerity of a boy scout and the precocious charisma of a whiz kid. Evan, eventually known to seven million YouTube subscribers as EvanTube, was one of the earliest kid influencers, internet famous for playing with toys.
EvanTube blew up by accident in October 2011, when a freelance videographer named Jared Lee sculpted the entire cast of the Angry Birds video game out of modeling clay for his 5-year-old son. Delighted by this handiwork, Evan and Jared decided to make a home video, like a show and tell. Situated at the family’s dining table with the figurines arrayed before him, Evan earnestly explained each character’s special powers, according to the video game.
“Yellow Bird goes super fast,” he said, in a halting voice, glancing occasionally toward his father, who was filming. He picked up a lumpy pale bird. “This is White Bird. It flies and drops white bombs and looks like a lemon when he dies.” A tiny smile revealed baby teeth.
Evan is 19 now and looking back at his life. “My brain was still developing when I was that young,” so he doesn’t remember every detail of how it all happened, he told me when I visited him at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where he is finishing his first year. He can’t recall why he wanted his own YouTube channel, only that he and his father sat at the computer and chose the name “EvanTube.” Evan and Jared uploaded their video and forgot about it. Within several months, it had 70,000 views. Ultimately, it reached 11 million.
At Christmas that year, Jared bought a haul of Angry Birds merch at Toys “R” Us — action figures and magnets, erasers and gummy candy, hoodies and blankets, backpacks and plush toys — and recorded as Evan showcased them, one by one, in front of the family’s dazzling Christmas tree. Since the show-and-tell video, his patter had become polished.
“Thank you for watching my video,” he said in his outro. “Happy New Year. Please subscribe.” The video has nearly 13 million views. It was obvious how, before the camera, Evan “came alive,” as his mother, Alisa, put it when I visited the family in a Northern California suburb.
Toys began arriving at the Lee family doorstep, boxes and boxes and boxes of them. Mash’ems, Lego and Nerf products. Barbie Dreamhouses, Skylanders games, anything “Star Wars.” It was “crazy,” Alisa said, like a “snowball.” Jared bought lots of toys, too. Evan unboxed, reviewed, explained, built and played with toys and games after school while his father recorded him. When the toys were boring or the instructions complex, Jared would “feed me the line and I’d say it back,” Evan told me.
Soon Evan’s younger sister, Jillian, who was almost 4, began to appear as Evan’s foil and sidekick. As they grew older, they would do “challenges,” drinking gross smoothies blended with onions, pickles and Oreos and dumping dog food, ketchup and sauerkraut on each other’s heads. Jared would stay up late editing, layering in sound and special effects. Making money on YouTube was a new frontier, and in 2012, Jared enlisted a creator network to help him maximize advertising rates and make brand deals. In 2013, through a collaboration with a novelty-gift outfit called Vat19, Jared uploaded a skit of Evan bringing a two-foot gummy worm to school in his lunchbox. At 146 million views, it is still the most popular EvanTube video of all time. Views converted to income. Some months, EvanTube was grossing $100,000 from Google ads alone, according to Jared.
In 2014, it reached a million subscribers. Evan was 9. “I don’t really know what my parents’ thought process was, putting me on the channel,” Evan told me. “I didn’t think it was a big deal because I was living it.” By the time he was 10, EvanTube had enabled the Lees to establish a family trust, savings, 529 college funds and Coogan accounts. Both children already had Roth I.R.A.s. Accountants said the Lees needed more write-offs and a bigger mortgage, so they purchased a $3 million six-bedroom, seven-bathroom modern villa inside a gated community. They had a swimming pool and, eventually, three Teslas in the driveway. Doors opened: free cruises, trips to Disney theme parks, vacations in London and Hong Kong. They vlogged their adventures as they went. Evan and Jillian appeared on “The Tonight Show.”
“Once you’re on the wave, you need to know how to ride it,” Jared said.
When it came to parenting, he and Alisa trusted their instincts. They never wanted to chase views by shocking or humiliating their children, as other YouTube parents did, berating them or, as in the case of DaddyOFive, smashing their Xbox with a hammer. And they didn’t want to vlog every day, like some of the other YouTube families they knew.
Jared was careful not to show his kids burping, going to the bathroom, picking their noses or in their underwear. The goal, he said, was always to come across as normal and wholesome: “Be likable. Get people to enjoy your presence and relate to you. That’s the thing.”
So when in middle school other kids began to tease and bully Evan, saying that his channel was “cringe” and that he was too old to be playing with toys, Evan was taken aback.
Around that time, “there was another thing I had to deal with,” Evan told me. We were sitting in a study room in the library at Loyola Marymount. Long, wide windows overlooked a colonnade of palm trees. Evan has the same deep dimples and unwavering eye contact as his younger self, but he wears his hair long and shaggy and his clothes slouchy and oversize, like a character in a skater comic. He recalled that in middle school, haters in the comments called him “spoiled,” and people told him things he had never considered before. His parents were “taking advantage” of him, they said, or “using you for money,” Evan told me. “That definitely made me feel sad. Like, sad-angry.” He started telling his parents he didn’t want to review toys anymore and withdrew to his room.
Children as ‘Commodities’
Evan Lee is coming of age when all parents, it seems, post videos of their children online, an untold number in the hopes of making money. The current titan of the kid influencers, inspired by EvanTube, is a 13-year-old named Ryan Kaji who started unboxing toys when he was 3. His Ryan’s World brand has had advertising deals with Lunchables and Legoland, a line of merch — pajamas and backpacks emblazoned with Ryan’s image — and a Nickelodeon television show. Conservative estimates put Ryan’s family earnings at $25 million annually. And though posters on Reddit rally around Ryan, saying he’s being exploited by his parents and deserves a shot at a normal life, his business associates disagree.
In an influencer economy — which McKinsey values at more than $21 billion worldwide — a breakthrough kid or family brand can be life-changing. In the cases of the most successful child influencers, “their great-grandkids are set for life,” said Chris Williams, the chief executive of PocketWatch, which partners with both Ryan’s World and EvanTube to make content and licensing deals.
Ryan is an outlier, of course. Wannabe child influencers far outnumber successes; even the most charismatic children and enterprising parents have no idea how hard it is to make money online, talent agents say. On my own social media feeds, children I’ve never met dance and sing and drop wisdom like mini-philosophers. Their parents manage their pages, which also sell hair bows and plug Donkey Kong video games. I am mesmerized by them, but also recoil at the implicit exchange of cuteness for cash, possibly because the basis of the transaction feels muddled: Are these children being authentically themselves? Or are they acting out an uncanny version of authenticity?
New documentaries highlight horrific abuses: parents who starved and bound their children, forced children to kiss onscreen, adopted a child and then gave him away. The prevalence of child predators who track kids online is well documented, as is the collusion of parents who sell pornographic images of their children, and even their used leotards, online. Train wrecks draw attention, so parents post videos of their young children throwing tantrums, potty training and being disciplined or punished.
A coalition of law professors, attorneys general and university students concerned about children’s rights is at work drafting language for state bills safeguarding the finances of minors who are also influencers. Laws have already been passed in Illinois, California, Minnesota and Utah, largely because of the efforts of an advocacy group called Quit Clicking Kids, which aims to “combat the monetization of children on social media,” according to its website.
But the activists’ concerns extend far beyond legal and financial protections. There is no ethical route for parents to trade on a child’s image online for profit, many say. Such transactions violate the child’s privacy — now and into the future, because a digital record is permanent. They stunt a child’s psychological development, replacing a sturdy identity with an idea of self “as a commodity for public consumption,” as the former child actor Alyson Stoner said in a webinar recently. In Stoner’s view, the child influencer economy does damage by blurring the lines between work and home: In an influencer setting, a child’s director, scriptwriter and publicist is also the parent.
At the heart of the debate lies the question of consent. Whose idea was the TikTok, the reel, the dance, the prank, the skit? To put it online for everyone to see? And what, precisely, does the consent of a 3- or 6-year-old mean in the context of a family business? When children are breadwinners, “it’s impossible to really talk about consent,” said Devorah Heitner, author of “Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World.”
She added: “It’s really a very powerful position to be the parent and say, ‘Oh, we need this.’ Or ‘This is going to help the family.’ Or ‘This is going to pay for you to go to college or for your sibling’s medical care.’”
In the best-case scenario, what are the effects of a life lived online? When Evan was in middle school and living in the new house, he started asking his parents about money. Where was it? Wasn’t it his? Why couldn’t he spend it? The way his parents explained it, the money was for the family’s future and they were a team, Evan said.
“If I didn’t work on YouTube, we probably wouldn’t have been able to afford” private college, he told me. Eventually, “I realized there is no way we would have made that much money unless my parents were involved,” he said. “An 8-year-old, 10-year-old, does not have the mind to keep a successful YouTube channel, generate that profit, work with brands.” He continued: “But if I was removed from the equation, there wouldn’t be a star.”
‘A Pretty Shy Kid’
Even before Evan was born, Jared videotaped everything. For work, he shot weddings, corporate events, infomercials. He recorded Evan’s birth. “I edited it, blurred stuff out and whatever,” Jared said. He set the video to music, burned it onto a DVD and designed a case. We were sitting on the sectional couch in the Lees’ living room, recognizable as the site of EvanTube Christmas mornings, while Chloe — the goldendoodle the kids got for Christmas in 2015 (another EvanTube episode) — sniffed around the snacks Alisa had placed on the coffee table. Jillian, 16, was sitting there, too.
Hearing of her brother’s birth video, Jillian laughed in horror. “Oh my gosh,” she said.
“Did you ever upload it?” Alisa asked Jared.
“To YouTube?” Jillian asked.
Jared said he hadn’t. He just likes having a video record of his life. “I’m a nostalgic person. I like to look back at things.” His children feel the same. Jillian said she likes to rewatch the old YouTube videos because they “are kind of my memories.”
Clean-cut and well-spoken, Jared, an amateur bodybuilder, has the physique of an action figure, the narrowness of his waist accentuated by mighty shoulders and arms. He has long been a collector of mass-market toys and merchandise. In his basement he keeps his extensive comic book collection, neatly preserved, labeled and mounted on a long wall. He collects humongous three-dimensional statues of Marvel and other comic book characters with rippling muscles and detachable heads, as well as vinyl Funko Pop collectible figurines, still in their boxes.
When Evan, at 5, became infatuated with Super Mario video games, his parents got him a Mario costume — red hat, blue overalls — and photographed him grinning and holding a Mario plushy, an image that still hangs in the family home. In the Lee household, it was not unusual for the father to film his son playing with Angry Birds toys.
Also, “Evan was a pretty shy kid,” an “‘I’m-here-but-don’t-pass-me-the-ball’ kind of kid,” Jared told me. So, from his and Alisa’s point of view, EvanTube initially served a pragmatic parenting purpose. The channel was like an extracurricular activity, “a way for him to just talk,” he said. “He didn’t have to talk to strangers. He was just talking to me.”
Alisa and Jared, avid theater nerds, met during rehearsals for a community theater production of “The King and I.” Jared was the king. Alisa was a servant. “I wasn’t even one of the wives,” she joked, ruefully. After Evan was born, Alisa quit her job as a kindergarten teacher. On EvanTube — where she is known as MommyTube and Jared as DaddyTube — she had a supporting role, helping the kids with sharp knives or opening the hot oven. Offscreen, she cleaned up messes and searched for places that would accept huge donations of toys, she told me.
Jared never had to quit his job. He just moved his focus away from weddings and toward the growing family business. In the earliest days of YouTube, creators earned money in two ways: through a portion of the revenues from ads placed next to the videos and through sponsorships and brand deals. Maker Studios, the network that was representing the Lees at the time, helped Jared boost views by brainstorming ideas and sharing analytics, said Williams of PocketWatch, who formerly worked at Maker. In addition, Maker offered EvanTube up as a brand partner, generating multiple revenue streams at once. For example, Universal Studios would hire Evan to make videos promoting “The Lego Movie,” and then, in the 48 hours before the release of the movie, only “The Lego Movie” ads would run on EvanTube, Williams explained. At the peak, the Lees were earning between $1 million and $2 million a year, Jared said.
The magic was Evan. His audience was mostly kids his own age, who considered him, as one agency executive put it to me, their cool friend who got all the best toys for Christmas. Young viewers felt as if they were at Evan’s house, hanging out with him and his fun family, eating candy and experiencing the ecstasy of an avalanche of toys.
Evan didn’t mind being super-famous when he was 8. He hardly noticed it. If kids at school were watching EvanTube, they probably just thought, “Hey, this is my friend that I watch on my phone,” he said in a video he made later.
It hurt Evan when in the comments a viewer called EvanTube “poopy pants,” and he didn’t like it when people at school called him “EvanTube” instead of his name. What he liked least was when his father wanted to record in public, dragging equipment to the schoolyard or a big-box store, especially when people he knew were there. In those instances, Evan felt “just shy and embarrassed,” he said. Starting when he was very young, Evan told his parents when he needed them to turn the camera off.
“I’ve told them, like, I just don’t want to record right now,” he said. “I want to play with my friends on the playground. And they got it.”
As the channel grew, effusive adults would frequently approach the Lees in a restaurant or amusement park with star-struck children in tow. In those instances, Jared did the talking while Evan withdrew. “I’d say, ‘Don’t hide behind us,’” Jared recalls. Alisa would remind him to be gracious, smile, say thank you and pose for a photo if asked. “Use your manners,” she’d say.
In fifth grade, Evan moved to the big new house and enrolled in a new school. For the first time, he experienced the disequilibrium of fame, which he called “surreal.”
“Everyone knew who I was, and I knew nobody,” he said. His peers, who were strangers, knew what his parents looked like, where he went on vacation, the name of his dog, the furniture in his house.
“I was just by the play structure chilling,” he remembered in a vlog, when the yelling began. “Everyone was like: ‘EvanTube! EvanTube! YouTuber! YouTuber!’” he said. “Keep in mind, when there’s a lot of people crowding around me, a lot of people giving me attention all at once, in person, it kind of stresses me out.” The horde followed Evan as he ran to the top of the play structure and tried to escape down the slide. Describing this in the video, recorded from inside his bedroom at 17, Evan maintains magnetic eye contact, but his delivery is energized, the final cut spliced with jokey memes.
In middle school, Evan stopped letting his father style his hair. And he didn’t want to review toys anymore. At 13, taller, thinner and with faint facial hair, he was still playing with slime. “DANG,” wrote a commenter at that time, “puberty hit him HARD.” He started telling his father he was too tired to record. Or he would start recording and then retreat into video games. The evolution away from toys was not instant. “I had to really make a case to my parents,” he told me. “It took them time to understand that I was growing up.” This transitional period lasted about three years, Evan said.
Jared saw how both kids were changing, and he didn’t want to push them. His first priority, always, was fun, he said. At the same time, they were powering a huge and successful business. Evan’s impression, in retrospect, is that they “didn’t want to hit the switch on something that was working.” As Jared put it, “We still had a loyal following, and the people who did stick around wanted to know what we were up to.”
None of the Lees like to talk openly about family tensions. In middle school, when Evan had the impulse to post on Twitter that he was “really sad,” his parents discouraged him. “You don’t need to let the internet know all of your emotions,” he remembered them saying.
I asked Jared: Should young children have to consent for their image to be used for financial gain? He paused. Of course children shouldn’t be muscled into things they don’t want to do, he said. But “kids probably don’t want to do a lot of things they should do, like go to school and work. I think there has to be some trust in the parenting of the child.”
Evan was determined to stop reviewing toys. “I didn’t really take into consideration that it would probably result in less views,” Evan said — or, as I pointed out, less family income. “Yeah,” he agreed. “I did not care.” A classmate had calf-slapped Evan at school. A teacher had quietly asked Evan for a favor: Could a fan she knew join his gaming channel? Evan was in high school during the pandemic, and he spent most of his time in his room, avoiding his father’s lens, playing Minecraft and Fortnite. “I didn’t have a lot of friends,” Evan said. “It was just a matter of me wanting to be private even in my own house. I was just like, ‘Let me not be on camera.’”
Creepy Comments
I sat in the Lees’ living room and played with their dog on a ferociously rainy day. The context for this conversation, I explained, was the wider debate: the concern about the exploitation and commodification of children by their parents. Evan, who signed off EvanTube at the end of high school, told me that “I don’t feel exploited at all.” Jared and Alisa are trying to teach their college student to responsibly live on a budget.
Some activists argue that kids’ images should never be used on social media for profit, I said. Jared considered this. “I think there might be a little over-concern with showing your kid’s face,” he said. “If we walk out on the street, people are going to see their face. As long as people don’t have a way to access your children directly, that’s the big thing.” Evan is using his last name now on his social media, but at EvanTube’s peak, Jared always made sure not to reveal the family’s last name or location.
Evan told me he had sometimes been followed at gamer conventions. Jillian said people occasionally leave creepy comments on her TikToks. Was there ever a time when Jared or Alisa became concerned about stalkers or predators because of their children’s broad visibility? They both looked surprised.
“No, nothing like that,” Alisa said. “Not that I’m aware of.”
Jared interjected. There was that one kid, the one with his shirt off, who uploaded his own YouTube videos where he ranted, swore, bullied and threatened Evan, he said. “It was bad,” Alisa agreed. “That would be the creepiest thing that ever happened.” Jared spoke to his management, who spoke to YouTube, and they took the videos down.
They didn’t tell Evan until years later. “It would have scared the crap out of me,” Evan told me. “I guess he was, like, threatening to kill me.”
Later that afternoon, Jillian came home from school and joined us on the couch. She performs with her parents in community musical theater productions. At the time, they were in rehearsals for “42nd Street.”
I asked them about TikToks I’d seen where she instructs her brother not to film her feet. A social media convention among young and famous people is not to show bare feet to avoid attention from foot fetishists. Jared was unfamiliar with this protocol. “I thought it was because you didn’t like your feet!” he said to her.
“No,” Jillian responded.
He pressed on. Feet are natural, he said. Why would you want to hide them? That’s not how he grew up.
“I think it’s social media. Because there’s things about foot fe-”
“Well, yeah,” Jared said. “But my thought on it is people have fetishes about everything. So are you going to hide yourself?”
“I don’t know,” Jillian answered. She looked helpless to translate her generational reality.
The next day, when I met Evan, I relayed this conversation. He sided firmly with his sister. “If we were doing a family vlog inside the house, I would not want my feet in the video. At all.” He would wear socks. He is very online. He sees the conversations.
“There are weird people out there,” he said.
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