In February 2025, YouTube turned 20. The video site has gone through a lot over the past two decades, including an acquisition, an earnings glow-up, and multiple generations of star creators. In our 20 Years of YouTube series, we’ll examine the uploads, trends, and influencers that have defined the world’s favorite video site — one year at a time. Click here for a full archive of the series.
In 2011, YouTube’s big star was a 14-year-old girl. In 2012, a pop star with wild dance moves took center stage. A year after that, it was an irreverent Swede’s turn in the spotlight.
Then, in 2014, things started getting really weird.
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In previous editions of this column, I delved into the lives and work of YouTube’s most iconic personalities, but there’s not much that can be said about DisneyCollectorBR. As her channel handle suggests, she is a Brazilian creator with a residence not far from Disney’s Floridian home base. According to a Yahoo News report, her name is Vera Credidio. And that, beyond the content of her channel, is about all we know.
Credidio’s biographic details may be sparse, but the story of her rise and fall on YouTube is a tale of epic proportions. With faceless, narrated videos that featured recognizable characters from Disney franchises, Credidio became the biggest creator YouTube had ever seen up to that point.
The numbers speak for themselves. When we launched our Tubefilter charts to rank YouTube channels based on their weekly viewership, DisneyCollectorBR quickly rose to the top of the head. By November 2013, Credidio’s channel was getting more than 36 million weekly views. Nearly two years later, in May 2015, DisneyCollectorBR was still in first place with a whopping 123.7 million weekly views. Only seven other channels even got half that many weekly views.
At the end of 2014, VentureBeat identified DisneyCollectorBR as YouTube’s most lucrative channel, with estimated earnings close to $5 million. The article also calls DisneyCollectorBR “quite possibly the most unusual channel I’ve seen,” and that feels just about right.
As soon as DisneyCollectorBR ascended to the top rung of the YouTube ladder, the complaints began. The most popular kid-friendly channels of yesteryear were affiliated with trusted sources like Sesame Street, but Credidio’s blockbuster hub was the exact opposite. At the time, no one knew where these videos were coming from, why an adult was roleplaying with children’s figurines, or what sort of education value the content offered.
A contemporaneous BuzzFeed piece described DisneyCollectorBR as a “mystifying annoyance” who kept kids enraptured for hours with uploads that felt more like Mouse House infomercials. Other criticisms came with sharper wording. Speaking to TODAY, tech strategist David Williams called the videos “crack for toddlers.”
DisneyCollectorBR videos perplexed parents, but kids couldn’t get enough of them. The rising trend of unboxing videos spoke to a universally joyous experience for children: That Christmas morning adrenaline rush when you run downstairs to tear open your presents. And because DisneyCollectorBR was a nameless, faceless operation, viewers could easily insert themselves in the role of the unboxer, heightening those happy feelings.
That phenomenon allowed DisneyCollectorBR to connect with YouTube-loving kids in a way that established, fully above-board children’s entertainment properties could not. The channel’s homemade trappings were its secret weapon.
More than a decade later, researchers are now understanding that faceless channels have numerous advantages over their easily identifiable counterparts. The “projection principle” — the aforementioned process of imagining oneself as the on-screen creator — is proving to be even more powerful in the era of YouTube Shorts. AffiliateNetwork.com, a network for faceless creators, recently reported that its ranks grew from 5,000 to 21,000 over a three-month span.
DisneyCollectorBR was one of the earliest success stories in that category, but even for YouTube’s biggest toy unboxing channel, nothing gold can stay. The rise of problematic videos aimed at children, like all those weird Elsa and Spiderman videos that blew up around 2017, convinced YouTube to police its kid-friendly library with a heavier hand. The platform purged billions of children’s videos, and Disney started restricting the use of its IP on unboxing and roleplaying channels.
A visit to DisneyCollectorBR in 2025 shows that all of the videos from the channel’s heyday have been taken down or made private. If it weren’t for a subscriber count north of ten million, there would be no evidence to suggest that the Disney-loving hub was ever the biggest thing on YouTube.
Even though DisneyCollectorBR has changed, Credidio continues to soldier on. The Brazilian creator has traded the unboxing clips for drawing tutorials, and she continues to chase YouTube’s hottest trends by incorporating some ASMR sounds into her work. When other creators make videos explaining what happened to DisneyCollectorBR, Credidio occasionally shows up in the comments to say hi.
Even though YouTube is now filled with faceless channels that chase views by pandering to the platform’s youngest viewers, DisneyCollectorBR still feels like it only could have reached the heights it reached during the era in which it achieved those milestones. The first half of the 2010s was the moment when YouTube opened its doors to the world, and one Brazilian creator showed that novel ideas about video production could produce unprecedented results. Parents didn’t have to like it — but they couldn’t knock the hustle.
