5-year-old threatens to dethrone YouTube king PewDiePie

LOS ANGELES — PewDiePie's reign as YouTube's top star had to end sometime — but to a five-year-old boy?

The Verge has a fascinating piece about the boy known simply as Ryan, the star of Ryan ToysReview, whose mom, the publication says, quit her job as a high school chemistry teacher to work on the channel full time. No last name or details about Ryan are made available on the YouTube channel.

Watch some of the videos, and they'll remind you of the videos you make or made with your kids. Parent with the video camera chasing their kid around the house, asking them questions. The difference is that the ultra-savvy mom here took the footage and edited it into something that millions of kids around the world wanted to see.

Ryan's Toy Review has been the most viewed on YouTube in the United States for 18 weeks in a row, according to market tracker TubeFilter, with 162.5 million views last week. The channel is reaping around $1 million in monthly ad revenue, says the Verge. His success shows the power of children on YouTube, a crowd even way younger than the pre-teen, teen and young adult audience thought to dominate YouTube.

"Toys Review for kids by a kid!" says the channel description. "Join Ryan to see him play with toys and review toys for kids! He loves Cars, Trains, Thomas and friends, Lego, Superheroes, Disney toys, open surprise eggs, play doh , Pixar Disney cars , Disney Planes, monster trucks, minions, playtime at the fun, family fun adventure and so much more!"

The channel has 8.8 billion total video views, and 5 million subscribers. That's still a far cry from PewDiePie's 51 million subscribers and 14 billion video views. But at age 5, Ryan has lots of time to grow his audience base.