How YouTube child star Anastasia Radzinskaya made NZ$41.4 million in 2021

Diagnosed with cerebral palsy at birth and told she may never speak, Anastasia Radzinskaya's parents initially started a YouTube channel to encourage their daughter to walk and talk. Photo / Instagram

While many of us are schlepping away at our 9 to 5 jobs, making enough to get by, a seven-year-old has pocketed more in a year than most of us will earn in a lifetime.

Meet Anastasia Radzinskaya, a primary school student from Russia who, according to The Sun, has become YouTube's most popular child star and one of its highest earners.

Ranked seventh in Forbes' list of 2020's richest YouTubers, she raked in NZ$27.4 million that year and went on to top that at $41.4 million last year. That brought her up to the sixth-highest-earning YouTube star in the world for 2021 and, for the third year in a row, she was the only female to make the list.

Radzinskaya, known as Nastya to her fans, shares with her 250 million YouTube subscribers and 480, 000 Instagram followers videos of her own little songs, videos about family holidays and lessons about responsibility.

But for her parents, their little girl's life didn't start out with even a thought that Radzinskaya would be a child star making bank.

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Born in January 2014, she was diagnosed with cerebral palsy and doctors warned her parents that she might never be able to speak. To help their daughter through her diagnosis, her mum and dad started a YouTube channel for her where they encouraged her to speak, walk and enjoy herself.

The following year her parents, who ran a bridal salon and a construction company, sold both businesses to invest in their daughter's YouTube channel, surviving off family savings until Nastya's channel began to turn a profit. Eventually Radzinskaya's cerebral palsy was reviewed and deemed a misdiagnosis.

But the family continued with the channel and watched in delight as their viewers grew and grew.

Over the course of a single year, 107 million subscribers across seven channels signed up for Nastya content.

By 2019, Forbes had noted Nastya as "one of the world's fastest-growing creators, thanks to videos in seven languages".

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Two years ago In 2020, Nastya sold the rights to her old YouTube videos to Spotter.

According to The Sun, she has kept the rights to new content and, along with her earnings from the Spotter deal, has also amassed her fortune by way of brand deals, a merchandise line and an NFT collection.

Now, alongside her parents, Nastya runs several YouTube channels which when combined make her the biggest child YouTuber in the world.