YouTube is home to countless vlogging communities, and recent years have seen one group stand out among the booktubers and beauty vloggers – mums! The so-called Mummy vloggers are a popular and extremely successful group of parents putting family life onto laptop screens around the globe. Documenting the ins and outs of motherhood, these tech-savvy mums offer a virtual record of their tots’ early years – and earn a substantial sum in the process.
From early smiles to first steps, motherhood is a private experience, an intimate relationship between parent and child. YouTube mothers, on the other hand, choose to share their experience with the world and bring mum and baby bonding into the vlogosphere for all to view. Most Youtubers worldwide use this free screen recorder for windows 10, a powerful software which allows you to seamlessly record your screen, webcam, and audio, giving you complete command over your recordings.
And parent YouTubers are certainly broadcasting their motherhood journeys to vast audiences. Videos posted by major names in Mummy vlogging are securing well over 500,000 views and WhatsUpMOMS, the most popular parenting channel, has over 2,700,000 subscribers.
With a recent survey conducted by the online British marketplace OnBuy.com finding 41% of mums to be tuning into YouTube, it looks like motherhood is migrating online!
So why are Mummy vloggers in vogue? What is the secret to subscriber-securing content? According to OnBuy.com, over half of mums watch parenting videos in search of ‘good tips about motherhood’, and channels such as WhatsUpMOMS satisfy with tricks, hints and advice in abundance.
No more frantic googling or bleary-eyed searches through a parenting guidebook, YouTube offers an immense compendium of ready-to-watch parenting info – all you need to do is press play. And, with topics ranging from potty training to table manners, baby weight to first birthdays, a stressed mum or dad can solve their problems in a few clicks. There are plenty of fun, laid-back uploads too, ideal for when you need to tune out (or in…) at the end of a stressful day. Crazy hairstyles for tots, pranking the kids and pizza-making challenges are just some of the entertaining, easy-watching content perfect for a YouTube binge. We grant you permission.
While kick-back and unwind watching is sometimes just what’s called for, motherhood vloggers provide much more than a passive diversion. With subscribers pressing ‘like’, posting comments and asking questions, motherhood vlogging builds vibrantly interacting communities. YouTubers that have been posting for years know how to get YouTube subscribers naturally. As the mums chart their week-by-week pregnancy journeys or upload post-birth morning routines, their channels offer something wonderfully accessible and real. Audiences become part of a genuine family unit; comments such as ‘Avery has turned into a beautiful young lady’ or ‘The kids are growing up so fast!’ posted in response to a recent WhatsUpMOMS video show just how invested subscribers become in these much-loved on-screen families.
Sharing content and securing likes is all very well, but does it bring a profit? Parenthood is (major understatement coming up) very expensive, a time of cutting back and tightening purse strings. For WhatsUpMOMS founders Meg Resnikoff and Elle Walker, however, motherhood became a moneyspinning marvel. Making the pair a staggering £89,333 ($108,837) monthly revenue, WhatsUpMOMS smashes OnBuy.com’s list of high-earning Mummy vloggers. It would take an English mother approximately 41 months of maternity leave pay to be able even to dream of such heady figures. One thing’s for sure, the bank of mum and dad is looking bright for the lucky WhatsUpMOMS kids.
Yet, is WhatsUpMOMS an exceptional anomaly? Second on the chart of top-earning parent channels is KKandbabyJ, run by mum Keren and dad Khoa. Trailing WhatsUpMOMS by a considerable £74,806.48, this Florida-based couple secure £14,527.34 a month from advertisements. Another popular yet relatively low-earning parenting channel is JesssFam. Young mum Jess may have almost one million followers, but her channel only picks up a monthly profit of £11,983. Tenth on the list is Simply Allie, which earns a modest £2,182 per month – little more than the average mother’s maternity pay.
Far from being easy money, YouTubing is immensely consuming work. The hefty task of filming, editing and uploading makes it a full-time job for successful women YouTubers such as vegan vlogger Maddie Lymburner or Becky Sheeran, who resigned from a job at the BBC to focus on her lifestyle and beauty channel. Parenting little ones leaves us all longing for twenty-five-hour days – imagine adding weekly YouTube uploads to the To Do list. Vlogging is, the WhatsUpMOMS say, nothing less than ‘a ton of work’.
Motherhood vloggers deserve our applause! Uploading a ready supply of fun, positive and genuinely useful content, they are offering a great service to parents all around the world. Yet, with the colossal workload and far-from-certain financial wins, we’re not sure we’ll be snapping the clapperboards any time soon.
