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Well|When a Child’s Life Becomes the Family Business
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/27/well/evantube-influencer-family.html
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Evan Lee was in elementary school when he became the linchpin of his family’s business. With his neatly combed hair and dimpled smile, he was a charm bomb, conveying on camera both the cheerful sincerity of a boy scout and the precocious charisma of a whiz kid. Evan, eventually known to seven million YouTube subscribers as EvanTube, was one of the earliest kid influencers, internet famous for playing with toys.
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EvanTube blew up by accident in October 2011, when a freelance videographer named Jared Lee sculpted the entire cast of the Angry Birds video game out of modeling clay for his 5-year-old son. Delighted by this handiwork, Evan and Jared decided to make a home video, like a show and tell. Situated at the family’s dining table with the figurines arrayed before him, Evan earnestly explained each character’s special powers, according to the video game.
“Yellow Bird goes super fast,” he said, in a halting voice, glancing occasionally toward his father, who was filming. He picked up a lumpy pale bird. “This is White Bird. It flies and drops white bombs and looks like a lemon when he dies.” A tiny smile revealed baby teeth.
Evan is 19 now and looking back at his life. “My brain was still developing when I was that young,” so he doesn’t remember every detail of how it all happened, he told me when I visited him at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where he is finishing his first year. He can’t recall why he wanted his own YouTube channel, only that he and his father sat at the computer and chose the name “EvanTube.” Evan and Jared uploaded their video and forgot about it. Within several months, it had 70,000 views. Ultimately, it reached 11 million.
At Christmas that year, Jared bought a haul of Angry Birds merch at Toys “R” Us — action figures and magnets, erasers and gummy candy, hoodies and blankets, backpacks and plush toys — and recorded as Evan showcased them, one by one, in front of the family’s dazzling Christmas tree. Since the show-and-tell video, his patter had become polished.
