Eight-year-old Ryan Kaji earned US$26 million this year on his YouTube channel, making him the highest-paid creator on the platform, according to a list published on Wednesday by Forbes magazine.
Kaji, whose real name is Ryan Guan, was already the video platform’s highest earner last year, with US$22 million, Forbes said.
His channel, “Ryan’s World,” launched in 2015 by his parents, is only three years old, but already has 22.9 million subscribers.
Initially called “Ryan Toys
Review,” it mostly consisted of “unboxing” videos — videos of the young star opening boxes of toys and playing with them.
A number of the videos have racked up more than 1 billion views, and the channel has received almost 35 billion views since its creation, according to data from the analytics Web site Social Blade.
Recently, the channel was renamed after a consumer advocacy organization, Truth in Advertising, filed a complaint with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) about it.
Truth in Advertising accused the channel of not clearly denoting which videos had been sponsored, meaning brands paid for the channel to feature their products.
The channel has also evolved as Ryan ages, now offering more educational videos in addition to the toys.
In Forbes’ ranking, Ryan Kaji surpassed the channel “Dude Perfect,” run by a group of friends from Texas who attempt seemingly impossible feats, such as launching basketballs into hoops from the tops of buildings or out of helicopters.
“Dude Perfect” came in second, up from third the year before, having earned US$20 million from June 1 last year to June 1 this year.
In third place was another child star’s channel, Russian Anastasia Radzinskaya. At only five years old, she earned US$18 million.
Her channels — “Like Nastya Vlog” and “Funny Stacy” — boast nearly 70 million subscribers in total, with videos in Russian, English and Spanish.
At the beginning of September, YouTube’s parent company, Google, agreed to pay a US$170 million fine after the FTC accused the Internet giant of collecting personal data from child YouTube users without permission.
The platform used the data to ensure that advertisers were able to target children, the FTC said.
With this year’s Semicon Taiwan trade show set to kick off on Wednesday, market attention has turned to the mass production of advanced packaging technologies and capacity expansion in Taiwan and the US. With traditional scaling reaching physical limits, heterogeneous integration and packaging technologies have emerged as key solutions. Surging demand for artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC) and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips has put technologies such as chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS), integrated fan-out (InFO), system on integrated chips (SoIC), 3D IC and fan-out panel-level packaging (FOPLP) at the center of semiconductor innovation, making them a major focus at this year’s trade show, according
DEBUT: The trade show is to feature 17 national pavilions, a new high for the event, including from Canada, Costa Rica, Lithuania, Sweden and Vietnam for the first time The Semicon Taiwan trade show, which opens on Wednesday, is expected to see a new high in the number of exhibitors and visitors from around the world, said its organizer, SEMI, which has described the annual event as the “Olympics of the semiconductor industry.” SEMI, which represents companies in the electronics manufacturing and design supply chain, and touts the annual exhibition as the most influential semiconductor trade show in the world, said more than 1,200 enterprises from 56 countries are to showcase their innovations across more than 4,100 booths, and that the event could attract 100,000 visitors. This year’s event features 17
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass