The father of nine-year-old blogger Mighty Mike Plays said that his son spent about $118,000 in three weeks on promotional advertising for Minecraft and Roblox videos on YouTube. All expenses were charged to a corporate credit card, the details of which had previously been saved in his father's Google account.
The man, who introduced himself only as Dave, spoke about the incident in a video titled "Message from Dad… Mighty Mike Plays is Over," published on September 15. According to him, he only learned about the scale of the expenses after he was called to a meeting with management, company employees, and the finance department.
As Dave recounted, his son started recording videos at about eight years old. The first streams were conducted directly from a PlayStation 5, without editing and with an inexpensive headset, and most videos only garnered five to 11 views.
Later, the father decided to show his child how video promotion works. According to him, he independently launched an advertising campaign for about $20 and verbally explained the basic steps: choose a budget, define the audience, and launch the ad.
However, his son, according to Dave's story, decided to create such campaigns himself and did not understand that the $20 amount was supposed to be a budget limit. At the same time, the saved bank card allowed new expenses to be paid each time.
Ultimately, the finance department showed him expenses for three weeks totaling about $118,000. The money was spent on advertising campaigns with names like Mighty Mike, Epic Roblox, and promoting Minecraft videos.
The results of such advertising indeed affected the views. Three promoted videos garnered approximately 200,000 views each. As of the check on September 16, the three most popular gaming videos on the channel had about 260,000, 224,000, and 178,000 views, respectively.
A few days before his father's address was published, the child also released a video titled "NeverMyFault made a Short about my Ad?", in which he talked about another author's reaction to one of his advertising campaigns. This video garnered about 70,000 views.
Now, according to Dave, the situation has been handed over for further consideration. He does not yet know if he will be able to keep his job or if he will need to compensate the company for the spent funds.