According to the Pew Research Center, children’s content and videos featuring children are among the most popular types of content on YouTube, averaging more than three times as many views as other types of videos. Child influencers such as Ryan Kaji of toy review YouTube channel Ryan’s World has been one of YouTube’s top earners for a number of years, pulling in tens of millions annually.

But there has been little in the way of legal protections to ensure that young content creators, including those who appear in family vlogs, are being fairly compensated for helping to amass millions in income that currently go to their parents or guardians.

Now, a new Illinois law, set to take effect on July 1, is giving kids some power by amending the state’s existing Child Labor Law—which previously only included child models, actors, and performers—to include compensation for child vloggers. The first-of-its-kind bill, introduced by state senator David Koehler in February 2023, gives those under the age of 16 residing in Illinois rights to monetary compensation when featured in videos that generate profit.

“We set it up to reflect what was done years ago with the Jackie Coogan Law,” says Koehler, referring to the legislation first introduced in California in 1939 to protect child actors by mandating that parents set aside a percentage of a child’s earnings in a trust account. 

The Illinois law will require parents to put aside 50 percent of earnings from vlogs into a trust account based on the percentage of time a child is featured in a video. For instance, if a child is in 100 percent of a video, then 50 percent of the earnings must be allocated to the trust.

The law applies to every video where a child is in at least 30 percent of a creator’s compensated video content within a 30-day period, including family vlogs—a genre of video content where parents film their daily home lives, typically featuring their children heavily.

Speaking up for child content creators

The idea for the bill was raised in 2022 by a then 15-year-old high schooler from Normal, Ill., named Shreya Nallamothu, who wasn’t even a creator herself. A few years earlier, she had seen a resurfaced video by vloggers The LaBrant Fam (12.9 million YouTube followers) in which a couple played an April Fools’ prank on their daughter by telling her they were giving their dog away, and filmed her reaction. “It made me really upset, because she’s obviously too young to really understand the ramifications of what’s being done to her,” Nallamothu says.

Nallamothu had seen a flood of family vlogs during the pandemic. It was only when the algorithms on YouTube and TikTok started serving up exposé videos about what children can face when being constantly filmed for content, she says, that she started thinking about the issue at large.

Nallamothu was shocked. “There was no legislation in place to protect these kids. Because child influencing is work. And these kids [being featured on social media] weren’t being fairly compensated for it or even recognized under the law.”

As part of an independent study class, a program at her high school that allows students to pursue an interest for a class credit under an adviser, Nallamothu did more research into child influencers and drafted a legal memo.

“I went in knowing that the legislative process is really slow, and my goal was just to get a bill filed or have a senator to work with,” she says. She sent the memo to her local legislators, and Koehler’s office responded. (Illinois has been at the forefront of data rights protection legislation, becoming the first state in 2008 to enact a biometric data privacy law that created requirements for entities that use and store biometric identifiers—such as facial recognition data—to protect individual privacy. Koehler was a State Senate sponsor on the bill.)

“The fact that this is now a law is just crazy to me,” says Nallamothu, who helped Koehler’s team with the wording of the bill. Yet she still sees room for it to expand.

The battle’s next front

Nallamothu, now 17, is turning her attention toward advocating for “right to be forgotten” laws, which would enable a child content creator, upon turning 18, to ask a platform to take down all the content they are in. Marisa Edmund, a policy specialist at the Family Online Safety Institute, believes that adopting this law could indeed help address some of the previous harm done by “sharenting” culture. While there are some implementation challenges, Edmund says, it could help address some of the harm that’s already been done.

In fact, an earlier draft of the Illinois bill included provisions for this right, Koehler says, but it added a layer of complexity that jeopardized the bill’s chance of getting passed quickly. (Without the provision, the bill passed unanimously, with no opposition.)

Today, bills similar to the one about to go into effect in Illinois that have been introduced in California, Washington, and Ohio contain this “right to be forgotten” provision.