How this daddy, daughter duo became YouTube stars thanks to their stunning voices
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EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the fourth in a series EastIdahoNews.com is calling “Social Media Stars.” Every day this week, we’ll be speaking with average Americans who made it big on YouTube and Facebook. Watch the previous stories at the links below.
For the past three years, Claire Crosby and her father, Dave, have been melting hearts around the world.
The Crosbys live in Seattle and post a new video on their YouTube channel every Friday. Some are musical, and others show everyday life, but all of them are watched repeatedly by more than 2.3 million subscribers.
The Crosbys posted their first video featuring Claire singing “Part of Your World” from Disney’s “The Little Mermaid.” Dave realized his daughter had perfect pitch and wanted to share the performance with family and friends. It exploded, and media outlets around the world shared the video. Before long, the TV show “Little Big Shots” invited Claire to come on.
“‘America’s Got Talent’ then reached out, and they wanted her to audition, but they said, ‘We need a live video,'” Dave Crosby tells EastIdahoNews.com.
The Crosbys recorded “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” from “Toy Story” for their audition. But they never made it to the NBC show. Instead, a famous talk show host came calling.
“Ellen (DeGeneres) called. We ended up signing a contract with Ellen, and we never ended up on ‘America’s Got Talent,'” Dave recalls.
The Crosbys began appearing on Ellen, and performances across the country started piling up, forcing Dave to quit his job at Amazon and ponder his family’s future.
Meanwhile, he was selected to be a contestant on “The Voice.”
“I went on ‘The Voice,’ took a hiatus from everything and had a few months in a hotel to think about what I was going to do in my life and what I was going to do with all this,” Dave says.
That’s when WyzeCam was born. Dave partnered with three colleagues from Amazon to create $20 smart home security cameras. Like his YouTube channel, the business was a huge hit.
Dave says he never wanted his YouTube channel to be a full-time job, even though his family has the talent and the audience to make it work.
“There’s a lot of families that do that. They turn it into a full-time gig,” he says. “There’s definitely a temptation to turn it into like a daily vlog. Tons of families … film a video every single day like that. I think the research is really thin on what effect it has on kids.”
Because of that concern, the family only posts a video once a week, but now everyone is involved, including little brother Carson, sister June and mom Ashley. They’ve even secured sponsorships with Disney and other companies.
The Crosbys have learned a few lessons over the years, mainly the importance of having good content and being consistent.
WATCH OUR UNEDITED INTERVIEW WITH THE CROSBYS HERE
“It takes a ton of time and consistency. You have to be able to upload and upload even when nobody is watching,” Dave says. “We were fortunate enough to have success early on, but I know tons of people that uploaded for a very long time with almost no views. … If you make good content, content is king.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: Nate Eaton’s daughter, Emerson, is a big fan of Claire. After the fathers spoke, Emerson conducted her own interview with Claire. Watch that video here.here:
OTHER SOCIAL MEDIA STARS
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