Mimetic Production in YouTube Toy Unboxing Videos

Abstract

This article contributes to research on children’s participation on social media by analyzing “toy unboxing” videos. Toy unboxing videos are a popular genre on the video-sharing platform YouTube, in which children and adults record themselves unpacking and reviewing various commercial toys. Emerging research in this area has focused on case studies of how these videos are consumed within the home as a means of augmenting offline toys and play practices, or, more commonly, on case studies of how these videos fit within YouTube’s broader economies of play and performance. Drawing on data produced through a content analysis of 100 recent toy unboxing videos, this article analyzes the place of children in the YouTube genre’s “affinity space.” The toy unboxing videos are coded across five key categories—genre, product, narration, production, and branding—to analyze variations of expertise, professionalism, and promotion across the genre. The findings indicate that children’s modes of production as amateur content producers both shape and are shaped by the shared and standardized conventions of this video genre. That is, while well-known “professional” channels such as EvanTube often seek to produce a semblance of playful amateur authenticity, the ostensibly “amateur” child unboxers mimic the production and branding strategies of the “professional” channels. We argue that this reciprocal relationship between professional and amateur content production can be best understood through the concept of “mimesis,” which characterizes the qualities of play and commercialization within the toy unboxing genre.