The namesake star of Nickelodeon’s preschool hit&nbsp;Ryan’s Mystery Playdate&nbsp;appears on set in a bright orange space suit ready to embark on an imaginary interplanetary adventure with his parents.&nbsp;



With a snap of the clapboard his mother, Loann, offers up the skit’s opening line — “Spaceship to aliens&#8230;” — before her then-7-year-oldcuts her off: “It’s ‘Mothership&nbsp;to aliens…,” her son corrects, stopping production and the 58-member TV crew behind it.



“Ryan, never correct the mother ship,” gently chides executive producer Jeff Sutphen from the director’s chair.



Ryan shrugs off the admonition. He routinely memorizes everyone’s lines, and will sometimes be caught on camera mouthing dialog along with his parents — forcing the occasional re-shoot. His father, Shion Kaji, jokes that if he hesitates even slightly with his delivery, he worries Ryan might steal his lines.



“I have a lot of words,” Ryan says in his own defense.



Not that he needs to defend himself. One of the leading child influencers on the planet, his Ryan’s World YouTube channel boasts 24 million subscribers, and Forbes estimates he earned $26 million in 2019, enough to make him the country’s<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/maddieberg/2019/12/18/the-highest-paid-youtube-stars-of-2019-the-kids-are-killing-it/#64bd924a38cd">&nbsp;highest paid YouTuber.</a>



Kaji’s mindshare among preschoolers is so big that ViacomCBS network came running to him in its bid to stem the outflow of child viewers. T<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/dawnchmielewski/2020/02/24/viacomcbs-has-lost-its-children-nickelodeon-is-looking-for-them-on-youtube/#572ad1597a70">wo years ago Nickelodeon turned to Pocket.watch</a>, a digital studio devoted to turning YouTube stars into global franchises, to bring Ryan to the kids’ TV network that’s been home to such iconic children’s characters as SpongeBob SquarePants and Dora the Explorer.



Welcome to the new world of children’s television. Once the domain of educators, pediatricians and psychologists concerned with fostering child development and school readiness, the D.I.Y. culture of the internet has thrown open the doors to anyone with an attention-grabbing idea. Sure, you can still find Big Bird on TV (though the feathery&nbsp;Sesame Street&nbsp;icon has moved his nest to HBO) and reruns of&nbsp;Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood&nbsp;online. But those classics are getting crowded out by shows like JibJab’s Gregg and Evan Spiridellis, whose StoryBots monochromatic robot characters were born on YouTube and now live on Netflix, or the husband-and-wife duo, Derek and Cannis Holder, who created the popular YouTube channel&nbsp;Little Baby Bum, a collection of nursery rhymes.&nbsp;



These home-grown shows have attracted global audiences in the millions. “If you were a creator in the ‘80s, you&#8217;d walk into Nickelodeon and Disney and hope that the executive in charge of making decisions thought that you had something worthwhile,” says Gregg Spiridellis. “That person is no longer relevant if you&#8217;re a creator with the ability to actually make something. You can put it out into the world and get validation. These open platforms — YouTube, Instagram — give you the opportunity to go prove the worth of your content in a way that was never possible before.”&nbsp;



A digital native, Ryan grew up on YouTube, singing along to nursery rhyme videos and watching “unboxing videos,” one of the peculiar genres of the platform, in which objects — toys, electronics, you name it — get unpacked to great fanfare. The breakout began one spring day when Ryan, age 3, asked his mother: “How come I’m not on YouTube?”



On a lark, Loann drove him toTarget and bought a Lego Duplo train set, which Ryan unpacked in his first “unboxing” video. Shot onan iPhone without edits, attention to lighting or animation, the video looks painfully amateurish today. Her son loved them, though, and so did family members in Vietnam and Japan, who enjoyed watching him grow up from a distance. “YouTube was this great platform for us to broadcast Ryan’s growth,” Shion recalls.



A single video changed the trajectory of the home-movie project and thrust the Kajis into the vanguard of YouTube’s burgeoning tribe of family vloggers. A student of the new medium, Ryan had noticed a novel twist to the unboxing genre, which featured kids cracking open giant eggs with multiple toys, instead of ripping open one box at a time.



The Kaji version became “GIANT Lightning McQueen Egg Surprise,” a seven-minute video, in which Ryan is roused from his Lightning McQueen race-car bed to extract toy cars, trucks and airplanes of various sizes from a giant red egg. The resulting video has been watched more than 1 billion times. Suddenly they found themselves accidental successors to TV legends like Fred Rogers,&nbsp;Sesame Street&nbsp;creators the Children’s Television Workshop (now the Sesame Workshop) and Muppet-maker Jim Henson.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“After four months, we were one of the top kids’ creators,” says Shion, in an interview conducted from the family’s 9,000-square-foot production facility in Texas. Still, as  improbable as it seems, no one in the family thought about cashing in on all that traffic until Loann stumbled upon a post about monetization while seeking tips on improving the quality of the videos. 



“I was like, ‘Hon, you can make money on YouTube.’ Shion’s response, recalls Loann, was&nbsp; ‘Are you sure?’”&nbsp;



She was, and she set a goal of $20 a week, enough to cover the cost of buying a new toy for Ryan to unbox each week, like a never-ending birthday celebration. When the first check arrived, for $100, “I was so proud,” she says. It was nothing, in retrospect: By the fall of 2016, the charismatic 4-year-old with an infectious smile and affinity for&nbsp;Thomas &amp; Friends&nbsp;trains and cars had amassed an online following of 4 million subscribers.&nbsp;



Shion and Loann quit their day jobs that year and devoted themselves full-time to the family’s budding media empire. They hired a video editor so they could focus on that aspect of production they enjoyed most: spending time with Ryan, playing around and filming. To shelter their son from burnout, they drew inspiration from Japan’s Virtual YouTubers, which feature anime-style cartoon characters who attract sizable online followings. The Kajis created animated alter-egos like superhero Red Titan (Ryan drew the stick-figure prototype himself), and an adventurous alligator, Gus the Gummy Gator. Today they have a roster of six virtual “friends” for Ryan, each depicting a facet of his personality.



As the output expands, so does the team. Twenty-eight animators, video editors and other creatives working for the family’s production company, Sunlight Entertainment, now generate the steady flow of educational videos, kid-friendly science experiments and cartoons that populate the eight channels that comprise Ryan’s World.&nbsp;



It’s not been a completely smooth ride, all things considered. The consumer watchdog Truth in Advertising filed a complaint last August with the Federal Trade Commission, accusing the Kajis’ YouTube channel, previously known as Ryan ToysReview, of deceptive advertising, saying it’s difficult for preschoolers to discern Ryan&#8217;s “innocent antics” from paid endorsements. The complaint cited as an example one June 2019 video, in which Ryan operates a make-believe Hardee’s drive-through window and delivers a “Star Pals” meal to his father. It’s the same month that the fast food chain announced a toy promotion featuring Ryan.



The regulatory agency hasn’t announced any public action against the YouTube channel, though this month the FTC said it would begin reviewing its guidelines concerning influencer marketing on social media, potentially ensnaring the Kajis and other online influencers in a cultural and political scrum over the commercialization of childhood.



Shion says he welcomes direction from regulators and works with a legal team to help identify online content that’s advertising. “The one thing that was very difficult for all the influencers (is) there was no clear guidance from FTC until recently,” he says.



Sorting it all out will be critical to keeping the millions flowing, even as Shion and Loann strive to balance the demands of Ryan’s budding entertainment career with their desire to give their son the life of a typical elementary-school kid. He attends public school and maintains a crowded calendar of after-school activities that includes playing&nbsp;Fortnite&nbsp;and&nbsp;Roblox&nbsp;with friends online, swimming (he’s perfecting his backstroke), computer coding, Taekwondo (he’s working toward earning a green belt) and gymnastics, where Ryan’s kinetic energy is expressed through headstands and flips.



In a room surrounded by scores of toys that bear his image, the child phenomenon reflects about the quirks of internet celebrity, and how complete strangers will approach him, and call him their best friend.



“They&#8217;re like ‘Ryan I saw you on my iPad and your mom and dad on my iPad too,’” Ryan says, nervously tugging on the long sleeves of his green shirt and swiveling back and forth on an office chair. He says he’s found it easy to make friends at school. “Some knew me just from who I am. Some people know me from YouTube.”



Put him in front of a camera, though, and he comes alive. Posing for photos, he offers up a fresh expression with every shutter click, sporting a big grin and thumbs up, an eye roll with a tongue out, another confidently grinning with arms folded, poking a finger at the lens, shrugging. It may be a hint of things to come. At the end of his first season on Nickelodeon, he penned a thank-you note to the director.



“Next season,” he wrote. “I want to direct, too.”

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How Ryan’s YouTube Playdate Created An Accidental (Eight-Year-Old) Millionaire

When 12-year-old Alex Okosi convinced his parents to allow him to stay in the United States with his older brothers following a family holiday, they reluctantly agreed, hoping that their last born would quickly become homesick and return home, with his tail between his legs.
“We had gone on holiday to visit my older brothers who were living and studying in the US. At that point in time, sending your kids to go study in the States was the ‘in-thing’ in Nigeria among parents who could afford this privilege,” says Okosi.
It took only two years after he arrived in the US for Okosi to awaken to the realization that his parents would not be financially able to support his US education for very long.
“Being the last of seven children, my parents had basically put six people before me through school. In as much as my father had been an excellent provider, it was obvious that by the time I would need to go to university, he would have long retired by then,” he says.
At the age of 14, Okosi started playing junior high basketball, in the hope that he would excel at both the sport and the books enough to earn a basketball scholarship.
“I pushed myself to work extremely hard at both my studies and basketball. Even though it was obvious that I was a better student than I was an athlete, I managed to get the scholarship that paid my university tuition,” says Okosi.
Having excelled at his studies and sports, Okosi also managed to pack in numerous after-school jobs and internships that made it easy for MTV Networks, now Viacom, to hire him on a practical training basis after he had completed his economics degree.
“As an international student, getting a company to hire you after you complete your studies was a major feat. I joined MTV in New York knowing that I would only be there for a year, after which I would have to go back home to Nigeria, or apply for a work visa, hopefully sponsored by MTV,” says Okosi.
From the moment he walked in at the iconic music television channel, Okosi says he immediately dreamt of taking it to his home continent. To achieve this, Okosi resolved to work harder than everyone else, like he had been doing throughout his entire schooling career in America.
“After serving my practical training year in the New York branch of MTV, I was then moved to Los Angeles where I was to learn about all the other functions of the cable television network business,” he says.
After some time in Los Angeles, Okosi began studying for his MBA, but the idea of taking MTV to Africa was still very much alive, and circumstances were about to conspire in his favor.
“On a typical day at the office, I was called from my office to come meet the group CEO of MTV Networks at the time, where I was introduced by my boss to the big boss, as the star of the Los Angeles operation. I honestly expected that the compliments by the bosses were only for the purpose of boosting my morale and nothing beyond that,” recalls Okosi.
To his surprise, Okosi received a call from the head office summoning him to a lunch meeting with the group’s CEO he had met days before.
“I realized that this was going to be my one and only chance to table my big idea. It was going to be now or never. Even though I had a comfortable life, knowing that MTV was present everywhere else but in Africa really bothered me. There was music in our continent; there was youth culture just like everywhere else in the world. It just felt like Africa was the last frontier at that point because the business was everywhere but [in Africa],” says Okosi.
After that promising lunch meeting, Okosi was then sent to London to experience the launch of a new branch. This move was designed to test him.
“The idea was that I should go to the United Kingdom and start the process from scratch to see if by the end of it, I would still be interested in going ahead with my plan to launch in Africa. Above all the other requirements, the most important objective was that I had to make sure that the London branch was financially viable, a business that actually made money,” says Okosi.
After a successful run in London, his bid to launch the channel in Africa was given the final stamp of approval. This was in 2004 when Okosi started the journey back and forth between Johannesburg and London, where he was putting together a team that was to launch “MTV Base” in February 2005.
“Besides the challenges that came with setting up smaller supporting branches in Nigeria and other lesser-developed countries in Africa, after we had a successful launch of our African headquarters in Johannesburg, my team’s number one major challenge was getting quality content from African artists. Here we were, as a youth music channel, hoping to cater to a global youth who wanted to see both international and local material, but the majority of the local material—especially the music videos—was just not up to par with our requirements,” he says.
This new challenge gave birth to another of Okosi’s winning ideas: the MTV Talent Reps, a non-profit program which would see Okosi’s MTV team members go to musicians to train them on the basics of creating and shooting music videos that would be worthy of being aired on the channel and on other sister channels across the global MTV network.
“Our talent reps acted as the middlemen between the record labels, artists and us as a content carrier. How we, as a station, saw it, is that we needed good quality content to carry on our channel, so that we could attract viewers, so that we could in turn, attract advertising that would make us a financially-sound business that would ultimately be a successful business,” says Okosi.
After the initial teething problems expected from a project of this scale, today MTV Base is one of the predominant music industry players across the continent, reporting a double-digit financial growth year-on-year. Besides playing an important role in taking African music to the rest of the world, Okosi says one of his most rewarding experiences is seeing the company launch the careers of some of the continent’s most loved video jockeys.
“Seeing people—like Sizwe Dhlomo—come to us as presenters and go on to become business people, is something that makes me very happy,” says Okosi. As senior vice-president and managing director of Viacom International Media Networks Africa, Okosi has also spear-headed the launch of other global channels in Africa: Comedy Central, VH1, BET and Nickelodeon. And to think that it all began with a childhood holiday.

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FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

How Ryan’s YouTube Playdate Created An Accidental (Eight-Year-Old) Millionaire

King Of The Last Frontier