They've been famous since they were kids. They wouldn't have it any other way.

ANAHEIM, Calif. — Onstage with other social media stars who became extremely famous before they were adults, Avia Colette is the only person looking back on that time. She’s 20 now, but the other creators sitting beside her are still kids.

Colette reflects on her child stardom with fondness — especially here at VidCon, a convention for members of the creator economy. She feels nostalgic, having attended in the past as a content creator, where she first began to realize she was well-known enough to have fans. Now she’s speaking on a panel titled “Famous Before 18.”

Colette was once a part of the Shaytards — a family of seven considered to be the pioneers of family vlogging. Her parents, Shay Carl and Colette Butler, launched their channel in 2009 when she was about 4 years old. “If life's worth living then it's worth recording!!!” the account’s description reads.

“Growing up [vlogging], it never felt not normal. It was just kind of what I always knew … I was just living life, and my dad recorded it,” Colette said onstage. “That’s where it started, and it’s been a lot of fun ever since.”

Colette is sitting beside Ava Ryan, a 15-year-old who became famous as a toddler when her mom posted short clips of her saying now-iconic lines like “I smell like beef” and “it’s fricken bats” on the now-defunct platform Vine. Ryan, whose dry wit shines through in her answers, is quick to admit she only posts sporadically — but maintains more than 1 million followers on Instagram.

One seat over is Like Nastya, whose real name is Anastasia Radzinskaya, an 11-year-old who’s among one of the most popular YouTubers in the world. She has 128 million subscribers. Her mom first posted videos of her reviewing toys, and as Nastya has grown up, her content has evolved into highly produced skits. She’s shy and humble about her unprecedented fame, still in the middle of figuring out what that means for her.

None of the three panelists can really remember life before content creation. For many of the people also attending VidCon this week, that’s the dream.

I’m in the audience with dozens of young people who are drinking up every word these influencers say as if they’ll be quizzed on it later. To my left, a gaggle of teenage boys are wearing shirts with their varying YouTube handles printed on the front, some with QR codes for easy scanning and subscribing to their respective accounts. To my right, a Lululemon-clad mom with perfect posture monitors her son, who can’t be older than 10, as he hunches over his iPhone.

Colette took up the family business, breaking out with her own YouTube channel as a teenager, where she vlogged her way through high school and homecoming. She still posts lifestyle content there weekly, both because it’s fun for her and because she hopes it could boost her acting career. She’s bubbly and well-spoken, prepared to answer questions about the negative reputation that family vlogging has faced since Ruby Franke, who posted videos with her family on their YouTube channel, 8 Passengers, was convicted of child abuse, and Piper Rockelle’s mom-manager, Tiffany Smith, was accused of creating an abusive environment involving children.

Colette speaks with kindness and empathy for her parents, who put her in front of a camera at a young age but did their best to hide her personal information — including her name, calling her Princess Tard instead — from their ever-expanding audience. They were just figuring things out in front of their kids, and the whole internet was watching.

“I think that my parents did a good job at not letting us see hate comments, but I remember one time me and my cousins went and scrolled, and I highly regretted it,” Colette said onstage. “Being in this industry, you kind of have to be OK with being misunderstood.”

When the moderator solicited questions from the audience, dozens of children and their parents raced to line up in the aisles to grab hold of the microphone, eagerly asking for advice on breaking into the industry.

One mother who creates content with her young son said that she sometimes feels pushy trying to keep him on a strict publishing schedule, since the algorithm favors weekly uploads. One time he got very upset about a negative comment.

“I love that you guys are talking about it. I think … let him know that the comments aren’t real, and whatever [commenters] are saying, that’s not who they are. If the person commenting doesn’t have a profile picture, they’re not the ones putting themselves out there … they don’t realize how hard it is to do that,” Colette responded from the stage. “I’m glad he’s saying how he feels about it. Just keep doing that. And if he wants to quit, let him.”

After a few more questions about dealing with fame and setting boundaries at home, I had to leave early, having coincidentally curated the most sobering double feature possible. At my next panel, titled “The New Rules Reshaping Family Content,” child star turned activist Alyson Stoner and leaders within the kid influencer industry discussed protections for the young and famous. From what I could tell, there weren’t any hopeful young content creators in the audience.

Being a child star in traditional entertainment is notoriously fraught — people are constantly arguing about how kids should get pay, in what ways they need protection and how mass perception can warp them psychologically. Online fame is even more difficult to regulate, though people are certainly trying. Some question whether it’s ethical to post as a child on the internet at all.

At her panel, Colette said that she thinks that as long as parents make sure that kids are OK with showing their faces online and keep lines of communication open, it’s all good. But how can kids know what they’re OK with if they’ve never done anything else?

As Stoner, who uses they/them pronouns, explained onstage minutes later, it’s not up to the kids to protect themselves — or even just the parents to protect their kids. That’s part of it, but there needs to be intervention at the “institutional level and broader legislative level” as well.

“We need some kind of stopgap — some kind of preventative frontline resource where parents, guardians and young people can understand what they’re participating in,” Stoner said. “There’s an overarching myth in policy that parents are always the best decision makers, and in reality, for a lot of young people, that’s simply not the case.”

“It doesn’t mean their parents don’t love them and don’t have their best interest in mind — it’s that we don’t know what we don’t know,” they added.

Journalist Fortesa Latifi, who has written for Yahoo News, has been studying this ecosystem for years. Onstage with Stoner, she explained that the cultural conversation has shifted to be particularly critical of kid influencers lately, but she doesn’t think putting kids online is “inherently evil.”

“We want to listen to the people who have had these experiences, some of them are sharing, ‘Hey, this is actually really great,’ or ‘Maybe we could have done this a little differently,’” Latifi said. Not every case is extreme.

When I spoke with Colette after her panel, she told me that her greatest hope is that people who create content, whether it’s with their parents or kids or on their own, do so out of genuine passion, not just in search of success. Her advice to kids who hope to get famous the way she did was to be consistent — not with their upload schedules but with who they are.

“It’s very oversaturated these days … there are so many people who have altered who they are that I think being yourself is the most important thing,” she told Yahoo Entertainment. “There’s no one else that is you. I feel like that genuine essence of being yourself makes your content attract more … if you have good intentions, you’re going to be good.”

It seems like Colette was born to be a YouTuber. She loves putting on a show, and she’s very comfortable in who she is. I even paused after the interview to ask which crimping tool she uses on her hair because it looked so effortlessly flawless. Because of this, she said her life can sometimes come across more glamorous than it really is.

“I try to be open with my followers about my mental health. But … it’s challenging living life for the first time,” she said. “Sometimes I am stressing out about coming up with ideas or crying over hate comments. It’s not always perfect, but at the end of the day, it’s what you love. You just have to let people misunderstand you.”

‘I love being famous’

The following day, I was rushed into VidCon’s press room for an interview because my subjects had been “swarmed.” They had to enter through a back door because everywhere they went, mobs of people came up to them asking for videos. It probably didn’t help with subtlety that part of their schtick is being as loud as possible.

AJ and Big Justice, known to some as the Costco Guys, are a father-son duo who blew up on TikTok after participating in a trend, speaking loudly with thick New Jersey accents. Now, they assign things ratings based on a “boom or doom” scale, with the best things receiving multiple “booms.” The outspoken Italian Americans often create content with 9-year-old Christian Joseph, who’s known online as the Rizzler. He sadly missed VidCon to attend the sports convention Fanatics Fest.

Big Justice, whose real name is Eric Befumo, is 12 years old. He told Yahoo Entertainment that he doesn’t really miss life before fame.

“Maybe [I miss] baseball sometimes because I got to play more days a week,” he said. “But I still get to play baseball, so not really. And I love being famous!”

Andrew Befumo, who goes by AJ, told Yahoo Entertainment that “there is so much good that comes out of the content world.”

“We got a lot of comments that I’m not doing the right thing for my son and all that. But we’ve opened up doors that are unimaginable for Big Justice,” he said. “And listen, as a father, it’s always my job to keep him safe, whether he’s living what we’d consider a normal life, or whether he’s living life as a famous 12-year-old.”

He advised parents to give their kids “room to grow.” They’re both working on chasing their dreams in other ways, having gained an audience through social media. Eric loves making music — he suggested I check out their newest release, “Believe in Boom” — and AJ is training for a big wrestling match in July with All Elite Wrestling.

“Lead with plenty of love, give a lot of hugs and give room to grow and support as much or as little as your son wants every step of the way,” AJ advised.

Eric’s advice for other kids hoping to be famous is that “you just have to try.” He shouted out to his friend Joaquin, whose consistent publishing schedule recently got him to 20,000 followers.

“Joaquin gets a big BOOM!” AJ said, with Eric joining in to punctuate the final word with him in unison. They gave several people and media outlets big booms — including Yahoo, which received five big booms — before leaving again through the secret door. That’s just the price of viral fame.