Best friends Hope Nixon and Annie Cole started a YouTube channel last year. Photo / Washington Post
Best friends Hope Nixon and Annie Cole started a YouTube channel last year. Photo / Washington Post
The boys in the YouTube videos always land their bottles perfectly upright. Max Cole has spent hours studying their routine, and now, he flips his own bottle into the air.
"Dude!" Max shouts. "It landed!"
Max, who is 6, jumps and waves his arms in the air. He knows just how to overreact to get his audience excited, what makes them click "thumbs up" and comment and subscribe. "Oh, my gosh!" he yells. "That is insane!"
But no one is watching.
Max's family is used to hearing him pretend that strangers on the internet can see him. In the six years he's been growing up, YouTube has become the largest platform for children's entertainment on Earth. Today's kids have little interest in the well-groomed child actors that past generations saw on TV. They want to watch each other.
Videos of kids simply acting like kids attract millions of viewers. Every moment of childhood - getting new toys, tagging along to the grocery store - is recorded and uploaded.
So is it any wonder that the children who watch these videos begin to act as if their lives are being recorded, too?
Cameras are all around Max and children of his age. The Coles have six kids, two dogs, three cats and 18 screens, nearly all with "record" buttons. Max's brother Mark Adam, 3, knows how to start recording on an iPad. Their sister Annie, 10, films herself at sleepovers and going shopping.
She posts the videos, with her mother's supervision, to her YouTube channel, "Annie's Vlogs."
More than 36,000 people will watch Annie in the back seat of her mother's SUV, going through the drive-through of a fast-food chain near her house north of Houston. In the world of YouTube, that's not many.
The beginning
The first video on YouTube was uploaded in 2005, four years before Max was born. The site's co-founder stands in front of two elephants at the zoo, telling the camera how they have "really, really, really long trunks, and that's cool".
It was a completely unremarkable 18 seconds - and a foreshadowing of the cultural force to come.
Mark Adam adores watching other little boys who do nothing but open eggs with plastic toys inside. Max would rather watch another kid play Minecraft than play it himself. Annie doesn't aspire to meet celebrities but the girls who get millions of views for braiding hair.
The children watching YouTube are seeing role models who don't just play - they perform. They're constantly considering how their experiences will be perceived by an audience.
Which is why, on Halloween, Annie is skipping down the sidewalk, being filmed by her mother, aware that thousands of children will soon watch her trick-or-treat.
"Get us walking toward you," she tells her mum, pausing with her best friend, Hope Nixon, as they stride toward the camera.
A moment later, she squeals and points to a front door in the distance.
Her excitement isn't for the prospect of more lollies. The house has an outdoor lamp that floods the driveway with light. This time, it won't be too dark for her walk to the door to be captured on film.
Zane Nixon films Hope for a SuperheroKids episode. Photo / Washington Post
Making money
It was Hope who first showed Annie the videos of "challenges" and DIY activities girls their age were doing on YouTube. Annie and Hope couldn't just try the activities, they explained to their mums, they needed to film them.
Shona and Nikki Nixon, Hope's mother, were wary. Both had home-schooled their children in an effort to have more control over how they were brought up. But they were "say yes" parents, who always gave their kids opportunities to try new things.
"What Annie wants is to do YouTube, and we had to support that," Shona explains.
They could use YouTube as a chance for their kids to learn how to stick to a schedule. Their childhood memories would be captured forever. The positives seemed to outweigh the negatives, though they couldn't be sure exactly what the negatives might be.
Before long, Annie and Hope were the stars of their own vlogs. A few months later, Hope's whole family started a channel together called SuperheroKids.
The children dress up in costumes and put on performances, just as generations before them have done. But now, their play time is actually work.
SuperheroKids has more than 300,000 subscribers and a six-figure ad-revenue stream. Their oldest son, 19-year-old Zane, writes scripts, sets up professional camera equipment, and edits each scene. Hope and her 13-, 7- and 4-year-old siblings study their lines and spend hours shooting scenes over and over.
The darker side
Mark Adam is transfixed. On the TV screen in front of him is 4-year-old YouTube sensation Ryan squishing Play-Doh into fruit shapes.
Since August, Ryan ToysReview has been the most-watched American channel on all of YouTube, according to TubeFilter. Ryan's videos were watched more than 600 million times in October alone, enough for every minor in the United States to have watched him eight times. Toy companies pay kids like Ryan to feature their toys because they understand that he has more influence over a young audience than any TV commercial. And every time someone clicks on one of Ryan's daily videos, his family makes money. One site estimates Ryan's ToysReview brings in more than US$1 million per month.
The children watching YouTube are seeing role models who don't just play - they perform.
It's this financial incentive that has, in part, made YouTube a potentially dangerous place for kids. There's a whole industry of YouTube creators who attract clicks by dressing as popular characters kids like, then acting out scenes most parents would never want their children to see.
You can find videos of Spider-Man ripping off the dress of Elsa from Frozen. Or tying her up in ropes or suggestively laying on top of her. The beloved characters regularly get pooped on, poked with syringes, impregnated and beheaded.
Google, which owns YouTube, has tried to combat this by creating a YouTube Kids app, which filters out any non-kid-friendly videos and allows parents to turn off the search function.
The Coles keep a close eye on what Mark Adams views, because they know how hard it can be for a 3-year-old to distinguish between real life and what he sees on screen. But they wonder how much he understands.
Hungry for more
Every week, the viewers are waiting. When thousands of people are watching your life, interesting things have to happen in it.
Beneath the camera-ready backdrop of bold colours and bright lighting of a trampoline park, Annie bounces and flips and struts. She takes the camera from her mother to check that each shot looks the way she wants it to.
Joel, 7, and Faith, 5, aren't allowed to watch YouTube at home but they're mesmerised as Annie jumps on to a trampoline, flips, and in midair tosses up two peace signs.
Annie turns the camera toward her. The 5-year-old isn't growing up in the online world but already knows how to be a part of it. She looks into the lens, smiles and gives two thumbs up.
