Archives 23 December 2019

“An eight-year-old boy who reviews toys on YouTube has been named by Forbes as the platform’s highest earner in 2019,” reports CNN:
Ryan Kaji, whose channel Ryan’s World has 22.9 million subscribers, earned $26 million in 2019 — up $4 million from his earnings in 2018, when he also gained the highest-earning YouTuber spot… Another child, Anastasia Radzinskaya, five, came in third place with earnings of $18 million. Radzinskaya, who was born in southern Russia and has cerebral palsy, appears in videos with her father. According to Forbes, she has 107 million subscribers across seven channels and her videos have been watched 42 billion times….

Dude Perfect — a group of five friends in their thirties who play sports and perform stunts — came in second place, earning $20 million.

YouTube has announced that next year it will stop personalized advertisements on children’s content. This comes after Google agreed to pay $170 million to settle accusations that YouTube broke the law when it knowingly tracked and sold ads targeted to children.

The nation’s oldest anti-vaccine advocacy group often emphasizes that it is supported primarily by small donations and concerned parents, describing its founder as the leader of a “national, grass roots movement.” But over the past decade a single donor has contributed more than $2.9 million to the National Vaccine Information Center, accounting for about 40 percent of the organization’s funding, according to the most recent available tax records.

That donor, osteopathic physician Joseph Mercola, has amassed a fortune selling natural health products, court records show, including vitamin supplements, some of which he claims are alternatives to vaccines.

In recent years, the center has been at the forefront of a movement that has led some parents to forgo or delay immunizing their children against vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles. Health officials say falling vaccination rates contributed to the infectious virus sickening more than 1,200 people in the United States this year, the largest number in more than 25 years. Measles outbreaks are surging worldwide, including in Samoa — where nearly 80 people have died since mid-October, the great majority of them young children and infants… The group claimed credit this year for helping to defeat legislation in a dozen states that would have made it harder for parents to opt out of vaccinating their children…

Mercola, whose claims about other products have drawn warnings from regulators, has also given at least $4 million to several groups that echo the anti-vaccine message. His net worth, derived largely from his network of private companies, has grown to “in excess of $100 million,” he said in a 2017 affidavit.

In 2010 Mercola’s site and the anti-vaccination group “launched a website that tracks vaccine-related legislation in every state. The site provides activists with detailed information, including how to sign up for public comment to support or oppose legislation in their state, where to park to attend a public hearing and what color T-shirt to wear to rallies…”

“In 2016, in response to a complaint from the Federal Trade Commission, Mercola refunded nearly $2.6 million to more than 1,300 people who bought tanning beds that he claimed could reduce the risk of skin cancer.”