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A year ago, Johnson County families had plenty of idle time on their hands and were looking for ways to fill it.
Brian Klem’s idea at the time was simple: Get more social media followers than his daughter’s Franklin basketball teammates had. Little did he know what he was getting himself and his family into.
“One night in March, the girls and I were sitting at the dining room table doing a puzzle,” Brian’s wife Marcy recalled, “and Brian walked in and he says, ‘I think I’m going to make a TikTok account.’ I said, ‘You’re going to make a TikTok account? You don’t even like to have your picture taken!’
“We just all kind of laughed about it, and the next thing you know him and Lauren are in the basement doing the first video.”
From those humble beginnings came an unlikely online monster. Brian and Marcy Klem and their four children — Ethan (age 20), Jackson (18), Lauren (15) and Taylor (8) — have nearly a million TikTok followers now, and they’ve become even bigger than that on YouTube since debuting there last fall.
A lot bigger — and it’s happened very quickly.
The Klem Family YouTube channel hit the 10,000 subscriber mark on Feb. 5; it has added more than 1.5 million in the two months since.
According to Tubefilter, a website that tracks social media trends, the family was the top-ranked YouTube creator in the United States for the week of April 5-11, and had one of the most viewed channels in the world this spring.
The Klems have more than 1.5 billion total video views on YouTube. They’ve been picking up more steam throughout the spring, attracting more than 100 million new views weekly.
“It doesn’t seem real,” Marcy Klem said. “We’ve talked about it a couple of times. We’re like, ‘Is this really happening?'”
The family’s online empire had humble beginnings; the Klems posted their first TikTok clip last March 22, and were thrilled to get a few hundred views on it. Later in the spring, they got their first real bump after a video of Lauren, Ethan and Brian re-enacting Ray Allen’s famous 3-point shot from the 2013 NBA Finals got noticed by basketball fans and generated more than a million views.
By May, the Klems’ TikTok account had more than 10,000 followers (easily reaching Brian’s original goal of surpassing all of Lauren’s teammates). But what really launched the family into the social media stratosphere was their challenge videos.
The first one — which featured some family members and friends taking turns to see who could stand closest to an opening car trunk without getting hit by it — was posted on July 4 and has since racked up more than 8 million views.
“When we saw the success of that one, we just started doing a challenge every day and just tried to build off of it,” Brian said.
Many of the family challenges have orbited around the table in the Klems’ sunroom. Left behind by the previous owners of the house, the table is an ideal size and has a gloss to it, similar to an air hockey table, that makes it perfect for games that involve sliding or rolling items across it. Those have become some of the family’s most popular clips.
One of the Klems’ go-to table games is Money Ball, where various tubes or boxes get taped to one end of the table marked with various amounts of money and participants take turns trying to roll balls into the holes and earn as much cash as possible.
And yes, Brian and Marcy have cash sitting next to the table at game time to actually pay out to the kids.
With the kids all busy with various organized sports, getting everyone together at home at the same time is rare, so the family will usually film a handful of videos at once, then edit and gradually post them over a period of several days.
A recent variation of the Money Ball game, filmed on vacation in Florida, that involved rolling bocce balls into holes in the sand has picked up more than 150 million YouTube views in about a week — the family’s second most viewed video yet.
A parents vs. kids game of “bottle flip tic tac toe” pitting Brian and Marcy against Jackson and Lauren has 175 million views on YouTube and another 81 million on TikTok since January.
“Sometimes I think it’s slowing down,” Brian said. “You can see for 48 hours on YouTube, the analytics, and it’s going like 33 million and I’m thinking, ‘That’s not very much,’ and then the next thing you know, we do that one on the beach and the last two days it’s been like 110 million views every 48 hours.”
As their followings have skyrocketed, the TikTok and YouTube accounts have started to become a source of income for the family, so they’ve started to put more resources into it, including a better camera and some lights to enhance the quality of the videos. A storage space in downtown Franklin that had been used as a batting cage is being converted into a recording studio.
The Klems are branching out onto other apps. They’ve signed on to do a live weekly show on Triller, another video-based social media platform, and they’ve started to land endorsement deals from companies such as Nabisco.
Ethan, who often serves as the point man behind the camera, has started posting live streams while he plays video games; he and perhaps some of his siblings are pondering the idea of going solo with their own spinoff channels.
Austin Mayster of Underscore Talent, who represents other families with significant online followings, found the Klems and sought them out a month ago. He says he’s “never quite seen anything like this in my career,” and he’s confident the family is just scratching the surface of their potential. He sees possibilities with more endorsements, products and perhaps even TV shows or movies.
The newfound fame hasn’t hit the family on a firsthand basis yet in terms of being approached by fans when they’re out and about. Jackson and Lauren both said that hasn’t really happened. Mayster, though, says that it’s just a matter of time before the Klems’ “internet fame” becomes more tangible.
“I promise you that will start happening,” he said. “I’ve been representing talent in this digital space for the last six years, and I’ve been witness to some really incredible fan moments. … I promise you that’s going to start happening with the Klem family. I think that, when looking at digital celebrities and traditional celebrities, the line is beginning to blur more and more. These folks that are gaining these big online presences, they are the new celebrities for the younger generation. I’ve seen fans scream, I’ve seen fans push, I’ve seen fans cry. It’s a really cool position that they’re growing to be in.”
Of course, fame can be fleeting — especially on the internet, where new trends are born and old ones are killed off all the time. The Klems don’t expect to be online celebrities forever, but the unassuming family that never set out to be famous in the first place will take it while it lasts.
“We’re going to try to ride it out as much as we can,” Brian said.