A new California law requires parents to set aside money earned by child social media influencers and deposit the earnings into accounts their kids can’t access until they are adults.
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the bill beside pop star and former child actress Demi Lovato on Thursday that mandates parents and guardians place a percentage of money made by minors on the web into trust accounts, according to the governor’s office.
The governor additionally signed a second piece of legislation that expands the state’s Coogan Law — a longstanding protection for child actors in Hollywood — to include minors employed as online content creators.
The law required 15% of children and teens’ earnings be placed in a trust to be untouched until their 18th birthday.
These protections will ensure minors who perform in online content “are protected from financial abuse,” Newsom’s office said.
“In old Hollywood, child actors were exploited. In 2024, it’s now child influencers,” Newsom said in a statement.
“Today, that modern exploitation ends through two new laws to protect young influencers on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and other social media platforms.”
The Golden State’s legislation follows that of Illinois, where legislators amended the state’s Child Labor law to include children featured on their parents’ or guardians’ social media accounts.
The bill specifically states that children under the age of 16 should receive 15% of an influencer’s gross earnings if they appear in at least 30% of monetized content online. Moms, dads or minders must be responsible for putting the earnings into a trust account.
“Sharenting” content has blown up as a lucrative business online over the past several years, especially with the explosion of social media.
Examples include “family vlogs” that document a family’s day-to-day life to brand-sponsored campaigns that feature kids advertising clothing or products.
An influencer with more than a million followers can earn up to $20,000 for a single sponsored post, according to Johanna Grange, a mom of two and the co-founder of Oak Street Social, a Chicago-based social media marketing firm.
Those with under 100,000 followers can still earn as much as $4,000 for one sponsored post, Grange told Good Morning America.
Some parents have turned their children’s lives into a career, she said.
“Social media has become the premium for getting your brand out to a large audience,” Grange told the outlet.
“Once blogging and Instagram and YouTube took off, and now we have TikTok and so many more, people found it as a viable way to make either a side hustle or a full-time compensation.”
Brooke Raybould, a mother of four boys from Virginia, has amassed 700,000 followers online sharing videos of her life as a mom. After just two years of posting, she was making more than six figures annually.
“It felt like I had like struck gold in some ways … because I can be home with my kids, share my natural life, do some work for a pretty condensed period throughout the day and make a decent living,” Raybould told GMA. “It was basically like a dream for me.”
The mother said she thinks of her work as similar to running a family business where everyone helps out. She said it’s rare for one of her sons, who are between the ages of 2 and 9, to be asked to help for more than 15 minutes, but she always asks if they’re comfortable participating.
“I tell them, “Mommy does this, we do this, I share it with other moms,” Raybould said.
Chris Chin manages his 8-year-old son’s YouTube channel, Kaven’s Adventures, which has more than 733,000 followers. He said more than a source of income, he thinks of their time on camera together as “bonding.”
Chin likened monetizing Kaven’s YouTube channel as being like parents who support their children in sports.
“Realistically, if you have your kid in sports … you may say you’re not in it for the money, but you’re putting your kid into something competitive so that in the future, you’re hoping they can earn money off of it,” he told Good Morning America.
“If you put [social media] in that perspective of it’s just a regular activity, then I think most parents start to understand.”