Watch out Ryan... it’s the Youtube toy show
Father-and-son duo raking in ad revenue for their online toy reviews
THIS is the Ireland-based father-and-son team whose online toy reviews have been watched more than 300 million times by viewers as far afield as the US and Saudi Arabia.
That makes them about 300 times more popular than Ryan Tubridy’s annual Late Late toy show.
But despite YouTube stars around the world, Arcadius Kul and his son Sammie are almost completely unknown here.
The videos are mainly watched by small children with their parents and are making money thanks to the large amount of advertising they attract – more money, in fact, than Mr Kul was earning as an architect during the Celtic Tiger.
Mr Kul, 39, moved to Co. Laois from the south of Poland about nine years ago to work. However, like many in the building trade, he lost his job during the crash. He decided to become a stay-at-home father, a move that turned out to be extraordinarily lucrative.
The father-and-son duo started posting videos on YouTube in the summer of 2012 and their online channel became more and
‘I earn more than I did when I was an architect’
more popular, before really taking off at the start of this year. The channel, which is called Cool pinksy, now has more than 280,000 subscribers and Mr Kul is earning more than he ever did as an architect.
Their most popular video was uploaded in August and shows Sammie opening a giant egg made of play dough and filled with Lego characters. It has been viewed more than 43.5 million times. A video posted last Thursday has already racked up more than 29,000 views. Their videos have been viewed more than 51 million times in the last month alone.
He told the Irish Mail on Sunday: ‘Two days after Sammie was born I lost my job. I stayed with him at home and my wife went back to work. That’s how it started.
‘We didn’t have a plan to do this. We spent month after month together and we started to develop a special bond, a bond fathers and sons don’t normally have, because fathers are usually out working.
‘If the crisis didn’t come, this never would have happened. We are originally from Poland and Sammie’s granny was pushing us to record some videos because she wanted to see him growing. She asked us to record as often as we could so we started making videos,’ he said.
The videos normally focus on Sammie, who is almost five years old, opening and playing with toys, usually Kinder eggs or Lego.
‘Sammie started to love Kinder eggs when he was about a year and a half old. He would always ask for them when we were in shops. So one day we made a video of Sammie unwrapping a Kinder egg. People started to watch it in their thousands,’ he explained.
Mr Kul said it was a friend who first told him advertisers paid money to people who could generate lots of views on their videos.
‘When you don’t have a job, you don’t need to hear that twice. So we started to make videos about Kinder eggs and after a while we started to make money,’ he said.
‘When we started two years ago, we were only earning about €2 a month from advertisers but now we are making more than I did when I was an architect,’ he said. Mr Kul declined to reveal how much money they are making, but said they were comfortable.
A website called Social blade, which calculates ad revenue based on views, estimates that their YouTube channel earns between €20,000 and €160,000 per month. This would mean an annual income of €240,000 to €1.9m. Advertisers pay different amounts depending on how marketable a channel’s content is. Mr Kul’s would be highly marketable.
Mr Kul is surprised the videos have become so popular. The majority of viewers are from the US. ‘The United Kingdom, Canada, Russia and, strangely enough, Saudia Arabia are the next biggest audiences,’ he said. Mr Kul said he spent hours each day replying to every comment that had been left on the videos. ‘I treat it as a job. For me it’s a full-time job. We used to do this once a week or maybe twice a month.
‘But once we started making money from it, we started making videos every day,’ he said.
He said of Sammie: ‘He knows
‘Most of our fans are outside Ireland’
what YouTube is and knows that people watch it, but he doesn’t really understand how many people watch it. Most of our fans are outside Ireland.’
The father and son have become so popular that they have been headhunted by a number of global media companies. At the Web Sum- mit in Dublin this week, the president of Fullscreen, one of the largest of these media firms, revealed he was in the process of trying to sign them up.
Ezra Cooperstein said: ‘We would love to do a deal with them but they are very sought after by our competitors too. We wanted to meet them and learn from them.’
Mr Kul said he was in talks with two YouTube networks and would sign a contract with one of them: ‘They promote your videos and manage the ads, which will hopefully increase views,’ he said.
When asked about plans for the future, he said he wanted to keep making videos but that there was no point thinking too far ahead.
‘My own situation shows that life is unpredictable. Ten years ago there was no YouTube, so we don’t know what’s coming. But for now we are happy doing this.’