Social media stars
They make the Gerber Baby look like a slacker
Mila and Emma Stauffer, two-year-old twin sisters who live with their parents and three older siblings near Phoenix, were sitting on the floor, having a discussion about what they might be when they grow up. “Maybe a teacher?” Emma said. “Emma, you hate kids!” Mila said. “How about a doctor,” Emma suggested. “Emma, you hate blood,” her sister said. “Oy yep, I hate blood,” Emma said. The video of this conversation was filmed by their 14-year-old sister, Kaitlin, this past summer. It appeared originally on their mother’s Instagram page, where it has been viewed 4.4 million times.
Mila and Emma are two breakthrough stars of a new class of social media celebrities: Young children who appear in viral videos.
In many of the most popular clips, these whippersnappers engage in adultlike conversations, amusingly given their babyish voices. The videos can be incredibly popular. And marketers have noticed.
Mila and Emma have done advertising work for Amazon, Nest, Dollar Rental Car, Macy’s and Walmart, among other companies.
“It is really lucrative,” said Katie Stauffer, their mother.
But the talent can be difficult. Emma does not love making videos, and Mila wants to make them only when she wants to. Stauffer has stopped cutting deals with companies that insist on giving her deadlines.
“You can’t make two-year-olds do anything,” she said.
Kaitlin often cues the children their more sophisticated lines. In one recent video, Mila addresses a date with her friend Sawyer that went boringly wrong when he paid more attention to his sports league than to her.
“Fantasy football?” Mila said, while raising her palm talk-to-the-hand style. “So basic.”
Ross Smith, a 25-year-old social media star (he has four million Facebook followers, 1.5 million on Instagram, and an average Snapchat post gets about one million views), has collaborated with several children.
“Kids are the new social influencer,” he said.
He is not a parent himself, but he understands the instinct to seize on corporate offers when they arise.
“Kids grow up and become less relevant. The sweet spot is between two and four,” after which, Smith said, “they’re not that cute.”
Smith lives in Columbus, Ohio, and is best known for videos he shoots with his 91-year-old “Granny.” They have worked with Mila, making a video of Granny giving her dating advice. It posted in September and has been viewed more than 31 million times on Smith’s Facebook page.
He has also teamed up with Korbin Jackson, a three-year-old from Dothan, Alabama, who is best known for his soccer and Ping-Pong ball trick shot videos.
Their video pitted Korbin against his sparring partner in a trick shot battle. It has been viewed 18 million times on Smith’s Facebook page.
Korbin got his start in social media after his parents made accounts to share videos and pictures of him with friends and family. His father, a former professional arena football player with his own large social media following, began to post videos of the bespectacled, ebullient child doing sports tricks.
Ten of Korbin’s videos have been featured on ESPN, and he has been interviewed by news stations in Japan and Romania. His Instagram feed has nearly 65,000 followers.
Born with a disability, Korbin spent two and a half years doing physical therapy.
“He finds so much joy and happiness in life, and we are so proud to share his good energy,” said his mother, Stephanie Jackson.
She said when Korbin arrives at school with his father, the older children surround him and ask to take selfies with the local celebrity.
In May, a video of him putting out the candle on a birthday cake by kicking a ball that hits and extinguishes the flame went viral. His parents sold the licensing rights to Jukin Media, and took him to the bank to open an account in his name, where any payment related to his videos would be deposited. He has earned about $5,000.
“That’s Korbin’s money, not ours,” she said.
Laws that regulate children’s rights to money earned by parents using their images on social media are not clear, lawyers say.
In California, the so-called Coogan Law — named for the child star Jackie Coogan, who worked with Charlie Chaplin in “The Kid” — mandates that a portion of money earned by child actors be placed in trust for the children.
But the law is written about children being employed or placed under contract with third parties. When parents are paid by brands to post images and videos of their children on social media, or they make money from YouTube ads, are children owed anything?
“These are uncharted waters,” said Anthony Amendola, a partner at the Los Angeles law firm Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp.
There are plenty of parents eager to jump in. Destiny Bennett and her husband, Devonte, moved to Los Angeles earlier this year and decided that acting would be a good career for their son Caidyn, 4.
But when he didn’t get the audition callbacks that his parents had hoped for, they decided to try marketing his talents through videos posted to Instagram and YouTube.
“We told him, ‘We can do our own auditions, and you can talk about anything you want.’”
Earlier this month, they posted a video in which Caidyn laments the way people touch his dreadlocks without his permission.
“I hate when I am with my mommy and people say, ‘Oh, are those braids?’ And it’s like, ‘No, Susan, those are dreads,’” Caidyn says. “But my mommy says I have to be polite.”
The video was a success, giving rise to a hashtag #NoSusan and bringing a total of 15,000 followers to his personal Instagram feed. His parents have been contacted about brand sponsorships.
Josh Gaines, known on social media as “Josh Darnit,” previously used the sixsecond video loop platform Vine, which was introduced on Twitter in 2013, to post videos of his children, most successfully his young son Evan smacking his dad. Making Vine videos was easy, he said, and he could repackage them on YouTube to generate revenue in addition to sponsorships.
When Vine shut down in 2016, Gaines recalibrated his focus on videos for Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. These videos require more production resources. Evan, now aged seven, has grown bored. “What I don’t like about doing them is they take a superlong time, and sometimes Dad tells me to say hard words. Like ‘subscribe,’” Evan said.
Fortunately, his older sister, Johnna, 11, has stepped up.
“Once we got to that age that Evan resisted a lot, I shifted more to my daughter,” Gaines said. “She is a little workhorse.”
“I like to be in the spotlight,” Johnna said. “If we have to do a script and Dad is telling us what to say, like an ad for a toy, or when we were doing the ones for the drones that had a script, that felt more like work.”
For a deal he cut with Best Buy, Gaines enticed Evan and Johnna to spend their last week of summer vacation taking a road trip to the Nintendo World Championship qualifiers, which were taking place at a few Best Buy stores.
He and his wife, Sarah, said they do not pay the children or split revenue with them. The family’s standard of living is improved when the social media business is going well, and all members benefit, they said.
Sponsorships and monetization were not on Katie Ryan’s mind when she started capturing snippets of her daughter Ava and posting them on Vine.
Ryan didn’t realize that Ava’s proclivity to create characters and do deadpan impersonations of them would attract a wider audience.
The videos consistently go viral. The Instagram account (it is in her mother’s name) has 717,000 followers.