Kids Diana Show

Kids Diana Show began as a way for a young mother in Ukraine to share videos of her daughter with relatives. Within two years both parents had left their jobs to run it, and it grew into one of the largest children’s channels on YouTube and a franchise with television series, toys and games.

Because the channel’s stars are children, this profile concentrates on the channel as a business and on the adults who run it, and includes only details the family has made public.

Kyiv, 2015

The channel was started in 2015 in Kyiv by Olena Kidisyuk, who wanted a simple way to share videos of her young daughter, Diana, with friends and family. Her husband, Volodymyr, worked as an IT programmer; Olena worked as a marketing manager for a construction company.

The videos — Diana playing, dressing up, pretending and exploring — found an audience far beyond the family. By 2016 the channel had passed one million subscribers.

Going Full Time

In 2017 the parents made the decision that turned a hobby into a business: both left their jobs to work on the channel full time. The same year the family moved to the United States. Diana’s brother, Roma, became a regular part of the videos, and the family later grew.

The format settled into short, colourful stories built around pretend play: dressing up as princesses, playing shop or doctor, going on small adventures, often with a gentle lesson about good behaviour. The stories are easy for very young children to follow, and many rely more on action than on words.

Many Languages

Like other leading family channels, Kids Diana Show invested in dubbing. Its videos are re-voiced into many languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Chinese and German, and published on separate channels so that each version reaches children in its own language.

The approach built one of the largest audiences in children’s entertainment. Its main channel had well over 100 million subscribers by the mid-2020s, and industry reports in 2023 counted the network as a whole among the most-viewed on YouTube.

The Franchise

The family partnered with pocket.watch, a Los Angeles company that turns children’s YouTube channels into broader entertainment brands. Together they built a franchise called “Love, Diana, the Princess of Play”, with animated and live-action content, consumer products and games.

Kids Diana Show series have been distributed on streaming services including Hulu and Amazon Prime Video. The brand’s products range from toys to toothbrushes, and its mobile games have been downloaded more than fifteen million times.

Questions About Children’s Channels

Channels built around young children raise questions that apply across the genre: how much children should appear on camera, whether they can meaningfully consent, how their earnings are protected, and what is appropriate for very young viewers. In 2019 YouTube and the US Federal Trade Commission introduced new rules for content made for children, restricting personalised advertising and comments, and several US states now require part of a child creator’s earnings to be set aside for them. Kids Diana Show operates within those rules.

What It Shows

Kids Diana Show is one of the clearest examples of how a family with a camera could build a children’s entertainment business to rival traditional studios, and then, with the right partner, turn it into a franchise on toy shelves and streaming services.

The pocket.watch Model

pocket.watch was founded in 2018 by former executives of Maker Studios, one of the first large networks of YouTube creators. Its idea was to treat the biggest children’s YouTube stars the way traditional studios treat cartoon characters: as franchises that could appear on streaming services, on toy shelves, on clothing and in games.

Its first major partner was Ryan’s World, the toy-review channel of an American boy named Ryan Kaji, which grew into a large consumer-products business. Kids Diana Show followed the same path. Licensing matters especially for children’s channels, because since 2019 videos made for children on YouTube cannot carry personalised advertising, which pays much more than ordinary ads.

The measure of it is the leap the parents made in 2017. Leaving stable jobs in Kyiv to bet on a YouTube channel was a large risk at the time. It turned a family’s home videos into a global brand.

Common Questions

How This Was Written

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