Diana's parents started posting videos of their 1-year-old daughter on YouTube in 2015. Today, she's a mega-star with 100 million subscribers. (2024)

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Kids Diana Show is a family YouTube channel created by the parents of 8-year-old Diana Kidisyuk

"How to get out?" asks a wide-eyed Diana Kidisyuk in a recent video posted on the Kids Diana Show YouTube channel.

The eight-year-old appears to be locked in a foam cage alongside her older brother, Roma. Their father, dressed in a police costume, tells them they need to complete a set of puzzles in order to receive the keys to escape their imprisonment.

The keys, foam cage, and police costume are all part of a high-production "escape room" challenge video, which, like many other videos on the channel, feature Diana and Roma playing with elaborate, colorful props and confidently speaking to the camera as they complete tasks.

The siblings — and their YouTube channel — have come a long way since May 2015, when their parents posted their first ever video. Diana was just one at the time, sitting in a pram and playing with a leaf in her hand, at one point even appearing to try and eat it. Engrossed in the touch and feel of the leaf, she barely seems to notice the shaky camera in front of her.

As of August 15, the Kidisyuk family has 100 million subscribers on their primary channel — a milestone only eight other channels have currently surpassed, according to analytics tracker SocialBlade.

According to Diana's parents, the eight-year-old was so excited to learn about the achievement that she started "jumping up and down on the bed."

The huge success of the channel also comes with drawbacks though, and family channels have faced particular scrutiny in recent years over concerns for the mental health and safety of the children featured.

Olena and Volodymyr Kidisyuk told Insider they have no plans to stop filming their kids as long as they enjoy it, even though it makes giving them "normal" lives increasingly difficult as they become internet celebrities.

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Soon, Olena and Volodymyr launched two separate channels for their children

Over time, Olena and Volodymyr started to notice that other people were posting videos about their children on family-vlogging channels, where parents typically share behind-the-scenes footage showing what raising kids is like.

The parents said they decided to start tailoring their videos toward an external audience by editing them and making them look more professional. They began posting vlog-style content about their children on separate channels, called Kids Diana Show and Kids Roma Show.

The parents and children spoke Russian in videos on the channel posted from 2015 to 2016, and they said their audience was largely made up of Russian-speaking people in countries like Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus.

Then in 2016, Kids Diana Show hit a million subscribers, and Olena and Volodymyr decided to pursue YouTube full-time. In 2018, they began to target a more global audience by captioning their videos in English and speaking in English more during filming.

The channel grew rapidly, going from 10 million to 15 million subscribers in just three months at one point in 2018, according to the internet archive The Wayback Machine.

The Kidisyuks told Insider that they started to notice that Diana's channel was growing much more rapidly than Kids Roma Show, which currently has 19.2 subscribers, so they decided to focus more on her channel, and they now see Kids Diana Show as a channel about the whole family.

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The family's success has allowed them to travel live in three different continents.

Through their successes on YouTube, the family has been able to live abroad, first in Miami, where they stayed for a year, and now in Dubai, where they have been living for the past three years. They made the move because they felt that living in the US put them too far away from their family in Ukraine.

Olena and Volodymyr told Insider they chose Dubai because the country had "good locations for shooting" videos, while also being close enough to Ukraine to be able to fly relatives over for visits.

The couple declined to disclose their annual YouTube earnings, beyond saying that they make "millions" of dollars every year. Insider reported that in 2019, when the channel had roughly 32 million subscribers, it generated an estimated $2.8 million to $44.7 million annually, according to estimates based on data from analytics tracker SocialBlade.

Olena and Volodymyr told Insider they have set some of their YouTube earnings aside for their children, so they can go to "good universities" after leaving school, and are also investing in real estate to protect their wealth. However, they said they don't have any "specific plans" for managing their earnings or the extent to which their children would be able to access these earnings in the future.

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It also spawned a series of spin-off channels.

While the Kids Diana Show channel, which is targeted at English-speaking viewers, currently has 100 million subscribers, the Kidisyuks also have tens of millions of followers on alternative channels, where their videos have been translated and dubbed into 20 other languages.

A Spanish-language channel for Diana and Roma has 26 million subscribers, while the family's Hindi-language channel has 23 million subscribers.

While Olena and Volodymyr started out on YouTube by filming and editing all their videos themselves, they said they've since hired a five-person team and also work with freelancers to help them produce content across their many channels.

The family has also signed some lucrative product deals. In 2020, the family launched a "Love, Diana," collection at Walmart.

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Diana's success comes at a time when YouTube viewers are growing increasingly concerned about a lack of legal safeguards to protect children on the internet.

The practice of minors starring in YouTube videos is controversial due to considerations about how much — or little — autonomy a child has in such a situation.

As Wired reported in August, "YouTube has yet to address how the loophole of parental consent can inadvertently exploit a child."

Family vlogging channels have been facing increased levels of backlash from viewers in recent years. Some former child YouTubers, who are now adults, are now coming forward to complain about the effects of being raised online. Additionally, the Daily Dot reported that consumers are becoming wary of "child exploitation" and concerned by the extent to which a child can consent to sharing their lives online.

One reason for these concerns is because of a lack of legal protection for children involved in family channels. Whereas some child entertainers in the US have their incomes protected under Coogan's Law — a California law that determined that earnings by a minor in the entertainment industry are the property of the minor and not their parents — child YouTube stars are not covered by such protections.

Creating protections around "kidfluencers" is especially difficult because the bulk of the labor typically takes place inside the home, and isn't monitored or managed by outside forces.

In January, Washington state introduced legislation to offer some protection to underage YouTubers. It proposes that family channels that earn at least 10 cents per view and that have a minor featured in at least 30% of content must set aside a percentage of the channel's income in a trust for the minor to access when they turn 18.

Earlier this year, UK's Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport Committee released a report expressing concern that child content creators are "being used by parents and family members as a source of revenue, affecting their privacy and creating security risks." The committee recommended legislation to provide "provisions on working hours and conditions, mandate the protection of the child's earnings, ensure a right to erasure and bring the child's working arrangements under the oversight of local authorities."

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Despite these concerns, the Kidisyuks have no imminent plans to change their content.

"One of the secrets of our success and longevity on YouTube is that our kids do not perceive it like work at all. So, they do not learn any lines. They just come and play naturally," the Kidisyuks told Insider.

They film every Tuesday and Thursday, for three hours each day, and on other days of the week, the children take part in leisure activities like swimming and gymnastics.

They also said they want to allow Diana and Roma to make decisions about the future of their channels as they get older.

"If Diana wants to stop shooting videos for small kids when she becomes a teenager, and maybe wants to start doing something more adult, then that's okay, we're ready to take that chance and launch a new channel," they said, adding, "If either of them wants to terminate their YouTube career, and want to become an engineer or do some other profession, we are open to that as well. This is their choice, and we do not want to push them."

The parents also told Insider that in the event that Diana and Roma wanted to stop making videos, they would also consider rebranding their channel to center around their youngest child, Oliver, who is currently a year old.

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Diana's parents are aware of the potential threat of child predators on the platform.

There are also growing concerns around the way in which videos starring children might serve child predators, through YouTube's automated recommendation system that suggests what viewers should watch next based on previous searches.

In 2019, Wired reported that a network of child predators was organizing in the comments sections under videos where children could be seen in partially exposed clothing. YouTube disabled comments on kids' content that same year as a safeguarding measure.

The Kidisyuk parents told Insider that they are aware of the risk of child predators watching their content — in the past, they noticed some "suspicious" comments under their videos, and blocked these users.

"It's crucial for us not only to make our kids feel safe but also to make sure that small viewers could get a positive, inspiring, and learning experience from our channels. And it became easier when the comments had been turned off," Volodymyr said.

Olena told Insider that as parents they keep a "watchful eye" on their children to make sure they are safe, "Not only while reading messages from viewers, but also during walks outside and while doing other stuff. In general, they have limited access to the internet and use it only with enabled parental controls"

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Despite their fame and wealth, the Kidisyuks say they want to give their kids a 'normal' life.

Volodymyr and Olena told Insider that even though Diana and Roma are still young, "they do realize how famous they are. If we go out to a mall in Dubai, for instance, we may get a queue of 50 people waiting to take a selfie with them."

The parents said they "do not see any really bad impact of fame on how the kids grow up or on their character." They said, "Diana is a very kind and very modest girl. She is happy when playing with other kids and there is no arrogance in her at all."

The Kidisyuks said they currently send Diana and Roma to a private school in Dubai, where they "feel like usual kids."

Ultimately, they said, "We do not feel that this fame has somehow influenced us. We don't sit around and think, 'wow, we are so famous.' We are mainly happy that our kids are healthy and don't have any problems," adding, "They have all they need in this life."

For more stories like this, check out coverage from Insider's Digital Culture team here.