The highest YouTube earner of 2014 made nearly $5 million just by opening Disney toy packages
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An unidentified individual or group responsible for uploading videos that simply show a woman opening Disney toys made an estimated $4.9 million last year, more than any other channel for 2014, according to OpenSlate, a video analytics platform that analyzes ad-supported content on YouTube.
Almost nothing is known about the person or people behind the channel, DC Toys Collector (DC), which exclusively features a young woman in intricately painted nails removing the toys from their packaging and then assembling them. The account did not respond to a YouTube message.
Created in 2012, DC now features more than 1,600 videos and gets 380 million views a month. Its most viewed video, with more than 172 million streams, is called “Play Doh Sparkle Princess Ariel Elsa Anna Disney Frozen MagiClip Glitter Glider Princesas Magic Clip.” It was uploaded just this July.
The channel averages about one new video a day. The latest is the similarly titled, “Mermaid Ariel’s Flower Showers Bathtub Color Changers Magical Water Princess Cinderella Anna Elsa.”
Uploaded Thursday, it already had nearly 200,000 views as of Friday morning.
Former Buzzfeed reporter Hillary Reinsberg was the first to report evidence of DC’s possible identity, a 43-year-old Brazilian woman living in Florida who runs another toy unboxing channel, BluCollection, with her husband.
Later, New York Times contributor Mireille Silcoff tracked down another candidate for the videos’ protagonist, a 21-year-old Brazilian woman (the DC channel’s original title was DisneyCollectorBR) living in Westchester, New York, named Melissa Lima. But Lima has never totally confirmed her identity. She appears to have no connection to Disney itself; a Disney rep did not immediately return requests for comment.
“[She is] super mysterious,” OpenSlate’s Kate Ritchie said. “She is just an anomaly — she just does so well on YouTube, [the channel] is likely earning a lot of money, but no one knows who she is, or where she is located. She just doesn’t want to be known.”
Disney Collector is part of a new, highly lucrative genre of online videos called “unboxing.” Unboxers with seemingly no active sponsorship will decide on a set of consumer items, from electronics to makeup, and didactically discuss a given product’s parts and features. But it’s toys that seem to have taken off — at least two other unboxers, DisneyCarToys and the aforementioned BluCollection ToyCollector currently sit on OpenSlate’s most-viewed list and could crack its top-earner list for 2015.
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