Like Nastya

Like Nastya is a children’s YouTube channel that began with a family filming their young daughter. Her parents, Anna and Sergey Radzinsky, sold their own businesses to run it, moved from southern Russia to Miami, and built it into one of the largest channels on YouTube, with videos in many languages, toys, a mobile game and an animated film in development.

Because the channel’s star is a child, 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.

Krasnodar

The family lived in Krasnodar, in southern Russia. Their daughter, Anastasia, known as Nastya, was born in 2014. The family has spoken publicly about a frightening early diagnosis: doctors feared she had cerebral palsy and might not be able to speak. The diagnosis later proved to be wrong.

In January 2016 her parents started a YouTube channel, at first to share videos of her with family and friends. At the time Anna owned a bridal salon and Sergey a small construction company.

All In

The videos — Nastya playing, pretending and going on small adventures with her father — found a large audience quickly. Her parents decided to commit fully, and sold their businesses to concentrate on the channel. It was a large risk: YouTube was still widely seen as a hobby rather than a career.

In 2018 the family moved from Krasnodar to Miami, Florida, to expand the brand internationally, work with American partners and produce more ambitious videos.

Many Languages

Like other leading children’s channels, Like Nastya grew by dubbing its videos into other languages and publishing them on separate channels. Forbes described it in 2019 as one of the world’s fastest-growing creators, “thanks to videos in seven languages”. The number of languages has grown since.

In 2019 Forbes ranked the channel third on its list of the highest-earning YouTube channels, estimating its annual income at about $18 million. It appeared on the list again in 2020. By 2026 the main channel had more than 130 million subscribers, and the channels together more than 300 million.

The Brand

The family has turned the channel into a wider children’s brand, with a toy line, a mobile game and an animated film in development. Nastya has also appeared on television. The family manages the brand with a team, and Anna and Sergey continue to appear in many of the videos.

Questions About Children’s Channels

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

What It Shows

Like Nastya is one of the clearest examples of how the internet changed children’s entertainment. A family in a provincial Russian city, with no connection to television or film, built a brand watched in dozens of countries, and then moved across the world to grow it.

Protecting Child Creators

The success of channels like Like Nastya has led lawmakers to look at how children who appear in family videos are protected. For decades, California’s “Coogan law” has required that part of a child actor’s earnings be placed in a trust. Online video was not covered.

That has begun to change. In 2023 Illinois became the first US state to pass a law requiring that children who appear in family vlogs receive a share of the earnings, held for them until adulthood. California passed a similar law in 2024, and other states have followed. The laws do not single out any particular family; they reflect how large the business of children’s channels has become.

The measure of it is the decision the parents made early on: to sell the businesses they had built and put everything into their daughter’s channel. It was a bet on a new kind of media, and it paid off on a scale few could have predicted.

Common Questions

How This Was Written

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