Is it possible an unknown, one-woman toy-reviewing YouTuber called “Disney Collector” is making more money than most CEOs?
Chris Ritter/BuzzFeed
To 3-year-olds, she is an obsession. To their parents, a mystifying annoyance. To YouTube marketers, an elusive moneymaker no one's been able to tap for profit.
To the rest of us, DisneyCollectorBR is a faceless YouTube channel giant that is consistently among the site's top most viewed per month. In April, the channel was the third-most viewed worldwide, coming in right behind Katy Perry. During the week of July 4, the DisneyCollectorBR channel received more views in the United States — 55 million — than any other channel on YouTube.
Despite the channel's massive, sweeping, and somewhat perplexing popularity, no one — neither the toddlers who watch with near-religious fervor and their parents, nor executives deeply embedded in the YouTube ecosystem and its economics — seem to have much of a clue who's behind it. In an earlier, more anonymous internet era, popularity and anonymity were more commonly paired. But today, where marketers have wrangled nearly every viral hit and YouTube stars' faces are on billboards in Times Square, staying anonymous amid billions of views is not only unusual, but damn near impossible to pull off.
Via youtube.com
All DisneyCollectorBR videos start the same way: A difficult-to-place, but seemingly non-American woman's voice says, "Hey guys, Disney Collector here. Today I'm going to show you..." The woman, who shows only her brightly manicured hands, proceeds to introduce and open a children's toy, many of them from recent Disney movies. She then demonstrates the toy's features — what you might less clinically call "playing." She regularly calls a toy's features "adorable," and tends to end her sentences with a singing inflection. In many videos, she also seems to make a deliberate effort to crinkle the toy's packaging, to ear-pleasing effect. As far as plot goes, that's about it.
DisneyCollectorBR's most watched video, an unwrapping of "egg surprises" branded by Angry Birds, SpongeBob, and Cars, recently hit 90 million views. Five other videos have received over 40 million views, and another 15 have over 20 million. The channel's hundreds of videos have been watched over 2.4 billion times — that's more than "Gangnam Style" by Psy.
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