Un-boxing toy unboxing: Analysing YouTube's toy unboxing creator culture

This thesis examines the intermingled personal, commercial, and algorithmic incentives undergirding toy unboxing creator culture. Using interviews with creators, analyses of videos, and walkthroughs of YouTube and YouTube Kids, this thesis historicizes the experiences of toy unboxing creator culture into three empirically grounded periods: an uncontested golden era for kids' content, creators joining forces to self-regulate and combat external pressures on their genre, and a new regulatory era. By bringing these creators' voices into debates about platforms, algorithms, and children's media, this thesis explains how these creators' agentic capabilities and ingenuity changed the children's media landscape.