The Shocking Ways Family Influencers Make Millions

Blogger kids bidding farewell to their dead grandmother’s casket. Children in emergency rooms, struggling to breathe while getting feeding tubes inserted. Kid after kid getting their first sex talk. All caught on video, shared by parents on social media for the world to see — and, most importantly, to be monetized.

Journalist Fortesa Latifi has seen all that and more from researching her new book Like, Follow, Subscribe, which examines influencer kids and the emotional cost of living a childhood online.

“I think one of the most surprising things was that multiple influencers admitted to me that the content that does best is content where their kid is sick, sad, or injured,” Latifi says. “That’s a hunch that I’d had in reporting, but for them to know that and acknowledge it and admit it to me on the record felt like something entirely different.”

As the mom an almost-2-year-old — in utero when Latifi sold her book as the follow-up to a viral 2023 Teen Vogue story about a child influencer —the reporter was frequently taken aback.

“There are many things that I can feel sympathy for when it comes to these parents and the decisions that they’re making,” she says. “But the choice to film your child when they’re in distress and not only film them but post it online — and not only post it online but know that you’re posting it in a way that’s going to be monetized — is something that I cannot wrap my mind around.”

Below, all we learned from Latifi about the ethics and finances of family influencers.

Unique Ethical Boundaries for Parents

Knowing that specific types of exploitive content will bring in high traffic leaves parents to make some interesting ethical decisions. One mom, for example, Alexandra Sabol, was barely making ends meet when her videos of making easy dinners and plating fast food for her kids went viral, mainly because hate watchers liked criticizing how she fed her family.

“I think it’s kind of a double edged sword, where before, TikTok, she was extremely low-income, and so obviously more difficult to feed your kids healthy food when you have less money,” says Latifi. “And then that content started doing really well online, and so at that point, you kind of have to double down on the schtick, right? If she starts feeding them vegetables and fruit, people aren’t going to tune in and tell her how awful she is — which might sound bad, but that’s money in her pocket.”

That kind of nuance consistently surprised Latifi during her research for the book.

“People tend to think that if you are a family blogger, or you’re a mom influencer, you’re doing something wrong. You’re exploiting your kids,” she says. But through speaking with the parents, she realized “they seem to be really thinking very deeply about the issues that the rest of us as parents are thinking about,” not to mention that many times, the parents were in “pretty vulnerable positions” themselves.

“They were often young parents or single parents or parents of many children who had been stay-at-home and now had to make a living. And I started to understand that maybe if I had been in a different position on my life, I could have made different choices,” Latifi says. Especially, she adds, when thinking about the stark difference between raking in family vlogging money to care for your kid or working 60 hours a week with $100 left after paying for daycare. “Like, you can see how the scales would tip.”

How Do Family Influencers Make Money — and How Much?

Family vloggers and influencers have several streams of income, Latifi explains, and one is getting paid directly from the platform. TikTok, YouTube, and (to a lesser extent), Instagram pay people who have a certain number of followers or subscribers for posting on the platform. “That can amount to a ton of money,” she says.

Then there are the brand deals and sponsorships — which you can easily spot when influencers talk about products and offer discounts with their special codes — plus affiliate links.

“That’s like, when people are posting Amazon hauls and they’re just linking literally every single thing that they use,” Latifi says. “They list everything, and if you click those links, and if you buy something from those links, they’re making money off that.”

Oh, and Latifi’s book explores one other surprising way that influencers clean up — by being Mormon (as is the case of so many family influencers). The Mormon Church is the richest in the world and plays a “heavy hand in the success of their members and influencers,” Latifi writes in a chapter exploring how the church provides direct monetary support to influencers.  

“And Mormons are incredible influencers,” she says, “even if you think of the main influencers in in the world right now, like Nara Smith and Ballerina Farm. And so, if you’ve ever wondered why so many Mormons are influencers, I have those answers for you.”

So how much are we talking about here? There’s a big range, but the numbers are frequently massive — one influencer mom made $3.6 million in a year on affiliate links alone, and it’s possible to make $6,000 a month on only ads, even if you just have half a million subscribers. Sabol was living in Section 8 housing with her kids and having trouble making ends meet before she started vlogging; she made about $4,500 off her first video and was eventually able to buy a new house for her family and return to school. YouTube creators with 10 million subscribers make between an estimated $5 and $8 million a year.

Many, as Latifi describes in her book, are blown away by their first influencer paycheck.

“A lot of the people that I talked to say they just posted because everyone’s posting videos of their kids — and then all of a sudden it goes viral,” Latifi recounts. “And you think, ‘Okay, I have a chance in front of me.’ You can decide: Are you going to capitalize on this, or is this going to be a one off? It’s that fork in the road.”

Why Latifi’s Won’t Put Her Own Kid Online

Latifi started reporting on kids long before she had her own. “And when I got pregnant, I just had this instinct that I couldn’t shake, to just keep it to myself and to our families and our friends,” she says, adding that she never posted online that she was pregnant, and hardly ever talked about it. “It just felt incredibly private, which is obviously the exact opposite of how most pregnancies function for influencer parents. But I think it’s really sent me in the other direction.” (Though that has changed with her second pregnancy, which the writer announced online — along with the distressing news that she’s suffering from hyperemesis gravidarum — in early March.)

And while she fully understands why some parents would make a different choice, especially after getting to know so many influencer families, it’s not for her.

“I don’t talk about my daughter, really, online. I don’t post her face. I don’t say her name. I just want her to be completely separate from my career,” she says. “I don’t know. It just feels very private to me.”