3 Million Fans Can’t Be Wrong…Can They?

Images courtesy of TikTok

The sun is still blazing at 6 p.m. on Redondo Beach, some 25 miles southwest of Los Angeles, when 19-year-old identical triplet brothers Chris, Matt, and Nick Sturniolo arrive at the set, floppy-haired, wide-smiled, and paler than their Italian surname—or the endless California sun overhead—might lead you to expect. They pile out of a Toyota minivan driven by their manager, a former travel blogger named Laura Filipowicz, cracking jokes and chattering nonstop. They are here to photograph, and be photographed in, their Sturniolo-branded line of merchandise—hoodies, T-shirts, and trucker hats featuring flowers, dinosaurs, and the words “Sturniolo, est. 2003,” the year they were born—created to commemorate a major milestone in their short careers: 2 million YouTube subscribers. In just 36 hours, all the merch will have sold out.

The brothers, 2021 graduates of Somerville High School, are Internet famous—if you’ve never heard of them, your YouTube-obsessed teenager likely has—having built a following by making 20-minute videos of themselves being teens: eating McDonald’s, going thrifting, getting haircuts, shopping for Christmas gifts for Mom, baking brownies blindfolded. In an early video, called “Triplet Trivia with a Special Guest,” their older brother, Justin, comes over and plays trivia with them; the loser gets their legs waxed. They are funny, except when they are serious. As one fan wrote in a comment, “They make me laugh so hard I feel like I have abs.”

It’s easy to downplay YouTube as a silly career—if one could call it a career, as many of their high school teachers back home were reluctant to do when Chris, Matt, and Nick announced they were forgoing college to become Internet stars instead. It turns out they are very good at it, and they are making a lot more money than most of us ever will. They are now bicoastal, as they say in Hollywood, splitting their time between their childhood home in Somerville and L.A., where Filipowicz—with whom they live and whose role might best be described as an adoptive momager—and their new talent agent at legendary Hollywood agency William Morris Endeavor help them land deals with brands such as Toyota and partnerships with other digital “creators” to help boost their numbers even more. By press time, they have 2.78 million subscribers on YouTube, plus 3.7 million on TikTok and more than 1.2 million on Instagram.

This is what makes them worthy of a splashy profile story and their first mainstream magazine feature, and also why they are wholly unimpressed by it. I am old media, in several senses—old enough to remember when writers filed pieces to editors by fax machine, old enough to be their mother. I’ve been invited to shadow them for a day. They are polite and engaged but also couldn’t care less, and their manager doesn’t seem particularly interested in the story, either. I was only allowed to spend one day with them, and I won’t have the chance for any follow-ups. I’m also not allowed to talk to their parents or brother (as they, I am told, are not “media trained”), and I won’t get any help connecting with their friends in Somerville. Later, they and their management team will ignore repeated requests by the magazine for a photo shoot with a professional photographer who worked with actor Robert Pattinson and singer Lil Nas X.

I have interviewed hundreds of big-time celebrities for more years than the triplets have been alive, including Kim Kardashian, arguably the most famous and busiest celebrity in the world, and getting access had never been this difficult. All of that, of course, was for print publications back when print magazines mattered more, at least to young people, anyway. Whereas once celebrities and editors were the sole tastemakers, now “regular” people are driving opinions and setting the trends on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. We live in an age when “be a YouTube star” is something lots of kids say they’d love to do, sort of like “play professional baseball” or “be in a rock band” was for kids growing up in the ’80s and ’90s.

The brothers model their Sturniolo-branded merch during the Redondo Beach photo shoot. / Photo by Max Keliehor

Still, how exactly did three kids from Somerville manage to do it, and at lightning speed? They make videos about what appears to be a lot of nothing: 20 minutes making a case for “Waffles, Pancakes, or French Toast,” or waxing opinionated about children on leashes, the virtue of naps, or navigating the aisles at Target. They are good-looking—“They get a lot of applications for girlfriends,” says Filipowicz, who reads all of their emails—but they are not quite “actor” good-looking. According to the younger set, they are funny, as much as they can be, without giving their content any more than 30 minutes of thought before they film it. They are smart and driven, though one of them says he barely passed high school. Whatever it is they are doing—and it isn’t always totally clear—it is clear that they are doing it right. And along the way, they aren’t just getting rich and famous but redefining, from the ground up, what it takes to be the next generation of famous Bostonians.

Growing up, everyone in Somerville knew the Sturniolo boys: Nick, older than Matt by two minutes, and Chris by four. They were well liked in school, by teachers and by the other kids. Also: They were triplets, and not just any triplets but cute triplets, with big blue eyes and wide smiles. They were nearly identical, other than the times when their mom, MaryLou, cut their hair into different shapes. According to family legend, a pregnant MaryLou went in for an ultrasound and began to cheer and clap when she heard that someone was having triplets. Turned out it wasn’t someone; it was her. “She thought they were talking to someone else!” Nick says.

MaryLou was extra involved in the triplets’ lives and school—she had been for Justin, too—eventually working as a family liaison for Somerville Public Schools. She features prominently in some of their early videos, joking with the boys in the kitchen, taking them clothes shopping, making them look at new tile for the bathroom. “They were just happy, good kids, from a really nice family,” says Wendy Cliggott, a fourth-grade teacher at the Brown School in Somerville, the triplets’ elementary, who cast them in the fourth-grade play as Cerberus, the three-headed dog. “They were playful and even a little mischievous but never ill behaved. When they were all together, you honestly couldn’t tell who was who. At recess, they’d stand outside and give me tutorials on telling them apart.” Often, people didn’t bother trying. “When we were getting awards for, like, hockey or graduation stuff in school, we’d get called up as ‘the triplets,’” Nick says. “There was never, like, a sense of doing things alone. Which wasn’t necessarily bad. It’s just been, like, the thing that happened. So people always ask us: ‘What is it like to be a triplet?’ Like, well, I don’t know what it’s like not to be a triplet.”

Elmer Pleitez, one of the boys’ closest friends from Somerville, met Chris first, sometime in middle school, when they both played the violin. He describes Nick as the most confident, Chris as the goofiest, and Matt as the shyest. “Everybody knew them because they were triplets,” Pleitez says. “But because MaryLou worked on the school committee, and also was friends with a lot of the mothers, people would be like, ‘Oh, if you’re going to a party, don’t tell the triplets.’” Except they did tell the triplets because everyone liked them and wanted them around.

But while they were a unit, three is an odd number. Matt and Chris were closer in looks and in temperament—the hardest to tell apart—whereas Nick had broader features he grew into even more as he got older. Matt and Chris excelled in sports, especially hockey and lacrosse. Sometimes Nick felt excluded from their group of guy friends, and he gravitated toward hanging out with girls. In eighth grade, Nick started to understand that he might be gay. He began to come out to people slowly in 2019—female friends first, followed by some guy friends, and then Matt, Chris, and his parents. Finally, he came out to the world in an April 2020 Instagram post. “I don’t even know why I was shocked,” Chris said in a video they later made telling the story of Nick’s coming-out process. “I knew Nick was gay from the second I knew what gay was.”

Even before COVID, the triplets’ high school experience had been what Chris now describes as “terrible.” Starting their sophomore year, Somerville High School was being rebuilt, and kids were bused between buildings all day long. “It was always super hard to tell how many kids were at Somerville High because there was always, like, half of them not there,” Nick says. The summer before their junior year, a fire destroyed their house, and the family was forced to relocate to an apartment. Then COVID arrived, and with it, the seeds of an idea.

They’d been sitting around at home one night a few weeks before Halloween 2020, bored and hungry. It was their senior year, and they hadn’t been to school in person since March—or in Chris’s case, to school at all; he says he hadn’t logged on to do schoolwork since the day everything shut down. The only things they liked about high school—seeing their friends, playing lacrosse, going to volleyball games—were no longer options. But like it had been their whole lives, they had each other, and if there was one thing they’d always been able to do, it was make each other laugh.

Meanwhile, the adults around them were starting to ask what they wanted to do after graduation. They didn’t know what to say other than they wanted to be YouTube stars. None of them was particularly interested in four more years of school. Making videos for an audience, though, was fun. Nick attached his phone to his selfie stick and hit record. “Hi, everyone,” he said into the camera. “We’re about to go to McDonald’s. And before we go there, I’m thinking we stop at Dollar Tree and get, like, Dollar Tree costumes.” And that’s how it all began.

The first time the Sturniolo Triplets met the Internet was on October 1, 2020, in a video titled, “McDonalds Q & A – Sturniolo Triplets.” It began in the brothers’ shared bedroom and ended in the McDonald’s parking lot. Nick had heard that Q & As make great first videos if you want to start a YouTube channel—easy to execute, ideas provided by others, no storyboarding or fancy camerawork required. Besides, late-night McDonald’s runs in Mom’s minivan had become a regular routine ever since Matt got his license, giving them a safe way to get out of the house during COVID.

In the video, the three boys piled into the minivan and headed to the Twin City Plaza Dollar Tree, where they outfitted themselves in bumblebee wings, mustaches, and handcuffs before cruising over to McDonald’s, where, from the backseat, Nick placed their order, barely able to contain himself: a 20-piece McNuggets to share, three large fries, and two large Dr Peppers. Then they pulled away, laughing so hard Matt said he peed a little. Parked, and with a mouthful of fries, they announced the start of the Q & A. First up, Nick said: “What kind of sauce do you each identify as?”

What follows is a mash-up of juvenile humor, teenage lingo, inside jokes, sibling razzing, and pure, banal joy. They are relatable unicorns, kids you could easily know from the neighborhood, but identical triplets. They simultaneously play to an imaginary audience and act like no one’s watching. “They call me silky barbecue on the low,” Matt answered. “On the low. ON THE LOW,” repeating the joke again, and louder, to make it funnier. Chris revealed he’s ketchup “because a majority of people like it, but there’s a few that don’t, and I don’t even like ketchup most of the time.”

“That’s sad,” Nick said.

The next video didn’t post for another month—a visit to see their grandmother and to Chick-fil-A. Then they started to make them more often, all of them unrehearsed, unpolished, nothing and everything all at once. They were snapshots of life in isolation, in which the little things are what get you through, and an invitation to digital connection at a time when IRL just wasn’t an option. “They give off a very genuine energy,” Pleitez says. “So it’s hard not to like them. It’s hard to not enjoy their videos because one, they’re funny, and two, they’re just super genuine. They just are themselves.”

As their videos have gained traction, they’ve brought the brothers closer together. Each triplet has a role to play in their shared career. While Chris is creative and chatty and comes up with a lot of ideas, Nick knows how to execute them. He produces and edits the videos and studies things like YouTube best practices. “Nick is definitely the leader,” Filipowicz says. Meanwhile, Matt, the quietest of the three, says he is just content to do what his brothers tell him to do: “They know what I like more than myself.” Still, they all understood early on that their success was due to their collective dynamic, and not any one or even two of them.

As their senior year went on, they planned to “really grind and see where this goes,” Chris recalls. By then, fans were starting to show up at the Twin City Plaza McDonald’s, where they’d taken to filming videos in the minivan. Once, they were followed home. By the time they returned to in-person schooling near the end of their senior year, Chris says, “I felt like Justin Bieber.”

In a video they posted around the time they hit the major milestone of 25,000 YouTube followers, titled “Are We Overrated? -Sturniolo Triplets,” they pondered their own popularity and opined on that of others. Beginning with Nick stuffed into a Star Market shopping cart, the video issued some verdicts—Starbucks and Chick-fil-A: overrated. Lunchables and Parmesan cheese: underrated. TikTok and Crumbl Cookies: properly rated. Someone asked about One Direction. “Not a thing anymore,” Chris said. They were divided on naps. Burritos “would be, like, 10 times better if they took all the things you wanted in the burrito and mixed it up, and then put it on, and then rolled up the burrito,” Chris said. “If I wanted a fucking mouthful of rice, I would have just gotten rice.” The segment ends with Nick and Chris punching and kicking the seats of Mom’s minivan, the Dr Pepper having fully set in. It was July 2021, they had only just graduated from high school, and their unconventional career was already taking off.

By the time I caught up with them this past June, the triplets had, you could say, arrived. They had a manager, a fancy Hollywood agent, and an al fresco table for seven at Porta Via, a restaurant on North Canon Drive in Beverly Hills that comes complete with all the stereotypical Beverly Hills trimmings: small dogs, dark sunglasses, fake boobs. They arrive as a set, along with Filipowicz, their manager, and her daughter, Madi, the 17-year-old creator credited—at least by her mother—with “discovering” them sometime last year after seeing an Instagram story one of them shared in which they detailed their future plans as “PURSUE YOUTUBE” as part of an account highlighting Somerville High School’s class of 2021. When they’re in L.A., the boys live with Filipowicz in a garage she renovated for them.

As their manager, Filipowicz fields offers, responds to emails, manages their schedule, and in some cases, pursues partnerships. She also orders Matt’s lunch for him after Chris orders a cheeseburger, plain: “He’s having the same thing as him,” she tells the server before jumping back into conversation. “I remember that day when Madi comes to me and goes, ‘Mom, you have to help them, look.’ And so I look, and everyone had, like, all these university [logos next to their pictures], and they had the YouTube logo,” she says. “And Madi goes, ‘They’re doing really well. We need to pick them up and we need to help them.’”

Before the triplets, Filipowicz’s experience as a manager was limited to Madi, who began making videos for YouTube when she was 11, and a few other kid-creators, some of whom she dropped as soon as she landed the Sturniolos. When the boys first connected with her about a year ago, they were at nearly 25,000 subscribers. By January, they had 100,000.

Whether Filipowicz’s management is working for them, though, is hard to say—she helped them secure a deal with Toyota (the company loaned the trio a minivan so they could film their car videos from inside it), but she didn’t share if or how much Toyota is paying them. Her own daughter’s YouTube account seems fixed at about 18,000 subscribers, a number that’s likely increased because of her proximity to the triplets. While Filipowicz talks about helping the brothers “build their brand,” she admits she doesn’t get involved in decisions about content or how they look or what they wear, though she does, she says, often remind them to brush their teeth before leaving the house. Certainly, convincing them to come to Los Angeles, where they’ve partnered with other creators, including Madi, and been able to explore networking opportunities, has given them an edge.

Still, momentum is a lot of it. “The first 100k is the hardest to get,” says Chris, who at lunch is dressed in gray sweatpants, furry Birkenstock sandals (with socks), and the same T-shirt as Matt, just in a different color. “And then after that, it’s kind of like a rhythm. If you keep doing what you’re doing, posting as frequently as you want and producing the same content, it’ll increase itself.” Shortly after they moved to L.A. in March and moved in with Filipowicz, they hit 1 million. When we meet in June, they’re at 2 million, a base that now jumps by about 20,000 a day. “We’re very consistent,” says Nick, who is the only one of the three with a nose ring in addition to the double ear piercings they all have; he also has several tattoos, three of them new in the last month. “Like, we haven’t missed [posting a video on] a Friday at 5:30 in, like, ever.”

Filipowicz didn’t share how much she charges brands for partnerships or Instagram and TikTok posts, though she says the boys are “monetized” and “completely fine for life.” She’s advised them to work with a financial planner, so they don’t blow their money, though she’s not particularly worried. Other than a recent splurge on a Simpsons video game—as later detailed in a YouTube video titled “Chris Bought an Arcade Game and Surprised Everyone”—they mostly spend their money on candy and clothes.

That said, one industry insider offered some clues about the triplets’ success. “The biggest creators on Instagram and YouTube can earn much, much more than $50k per post,” says Lisette Sand-Freedman, the CEO of Shadow, a creative marketing and communications agency in New York City, where her team works with brands like Bentley Motors, Sun Bum, and Moët Hennessy to promote their products in both “traditional” forms of media—magazines, TV—and influencer marketing. Getting there, she says, is a mix of luck, great content, and solid management. “People say Kim Kardashian shouldn’t be famous. Honestly, there is no one more hardworking and focused than Kim Kardashian,” she says. “Being an influencer with power takes hard work, commitment, and a team guiding you in the right direction.”

While brands and the agencies, like Shadow, that market them still love a great print placement because it carries a certain level of credibility and prestige, social media drives immediate traffic and connection these days. “Culturally, we’ve moved into an era where the ‘casualification’ of a brand reigns supreme, and a ‘brand’ doesn’t necessarily belong to the brand anymore; it belongs to the population and how they interpret it,” Sand-Freedman says. “You can’t compare a magazine or a newspaper—even a beautifully executed one—to a platform like TikTok or Instagram. These platforms are visual, interactive, addictive, entertaining. We bring them into bed with us, and engage with them while we eat and while we walk down the street. We look at them with our kids and with our parents. Even the most transcendent and compelling columnist will be hard pressed to compete with a modern creator’s ability to really penetrate our lives in such a way. That kind of intimacy builds a sense of consumer trust that gives way to tremendous selling power.”

Gen Z consumers, in particular, want “raw and real” content and are quick to point out things that are contrived and overly produced—especially ads. As a result, brands have begun to put creative power into the hands of partners who know their audiences best. The Sturniolos have managed to fit that bill perfectly, and are now poised to bill accordingly.

A few weeks before I visited them, the triplets showed their first indication of making the transition into more traditional channels of fame management. Or maybe the traditional channels of fame management were meeting them halfway. They agreed to work with agent Andre Jones of the high-powered WME, which boasts a client roster that has included Richard Gere, Queen Latifah, and John Travolta. He managed to convince Filipowicz, after some work, that a partnership with his agency would be worthwhile. (“It’s a verbal commitment,” says Filipowicz, who, for better or worse, remains in charge. “Nothing in writing.”) “Someone like Andre and WME obviously carry some weight,” she says. “But we’re just testing it out. A huge agency can be really beneficial. I want to see what they do for them. I don’t need him to bring me a $1,000 brand deal. I can do that. I need him to bring a $500,000 brand deal. And if he could do it, he takes a percentage or whatever, we don’t care. But having that WME backing can be a good thing. Can be. I just have to watch that.” As part of the verbal deal, Filipowicz adds, they’re also representing Madi. “[Andre] represents the four of them,” she says. “But I’m always the kind of gatekeeper. He knows I’m watching. They don’t like that, I guess. They pretend like they do.”

For Jones’s part, taking on the triplets was a no-brainer. “They aren’t viral sensations,” he says. “They are growing creators. [Their numbers continue] to go up. Which is interesting because it means a) their fan base is growing, but b) their fan base is staying, which is the hardest thing for a creator to keep. It’s really difficult to find those 100,000 true fans that come back every time.” They have fan accounts, he notes, for their fan accounts. There are also Pinterest boards dedicated to posting Sturniolo baby photos; fan-fiction sites; and all over Etsy, unofficial fan-made merchandise, like prayer candles featuring their grinning mugs and tumblers decorated with photos pulled from their respective Instagram accounts and beaded bracelets that spell out STURNIOLO. For a time, on the website Cameo, you could even pay $5 to get a Sturniolo triplet to record a message for yourself or a friend.

As far as their appeal? The guys can sort of say, but not really. Certainly, the novelty of being a triplet has something to do with it. But they also work hard to engage with their fans by answering DMs to their social accounts and by letting them dictate their video content. “We’re constantly asking our audience, ‘What do you want us to do for videos?’ Because they’re the ones who are going to watch it,” Nick says. “Like, what do you want us to talk about on Friday?” The earliest they say they know the topic of a video is half an hour in advance. “Most of our videos are their ideas, so it’s so easy,” Chris says. “They love telling us what to do.”

“And there are infinite things in this world to talk about,” Nick adds. “Like, we’ll never run out of ideas for as long as life goes. That’s what’s awesome about it.”

Jones thinks he knows what their appeal is: “They make you laugh, and they make you feel something,” he says. “That’s why I got so excited about them. Like, they’re not doing anything outlandish. They’re talking to each other like brothers. And if they can just talk to each other like brothers, and people fall in love with them, can you imagine if they did something different? There are endless possibilities.”

About those possibilities: On the same day as our interview, the triplets meet with potential producers for a podcast, in which, they imagine, they might cover topics that deserve more airtime than the average 22-minute video or be more serious than, say, the time Chris shit in a Dunkin’ Donuts bag when their car broke down for five hours on the highway. “Dialing down the chaos” is how Nick envisions the podcast. “Mad relaxed,” Chris adds.

Later that night in Redondo Beach, their merch-shoot photographer, a mustached twentysomething wearing a red trucker hat and ripped jeans, attempts to corral them over a few hours while the brothers horse around in a mash-up of silly poses, serious poses, and endless ribbing: “Tell a joke, Matt. Matt, smile,” and “You’re wrinkly, dude,” and “I can see your nipples,” plus a recounting of going into the seafood restaurant to pee and seeing live crabs inside the bathroom. The beach porta-potty, they conclude, was nasty but not as nasty as real live crabs. Nick takes out his phone and starts filming content that will later appear on Instagram @sturniolo.triplets.

A girl walks by with her mom and recognizes them. “Are you guys filming a TikTok?” she asks excitedly.

“No, we’re doing a shoot for our clothing brand,” Nick says. Then, looking down over the dock: “Dude, is that a stingray? Full blown!”

At the beach, they take one last poetic group shot walking through some ocean mist as the sun sets over the Pacific; Filipowicz trails behind them with an armful of hoodies and tees so big she has to crane her head to the right to see around it. They are living the dream—they are being paid to have fun. And so, from here, they’ll ride the YouTube wave as long as they can, and then, when they have to—or when someone gets bored—they’ll start to explore more options. For Nick, that might be photography. Chris thinks he might want to work in the music space. Matt loves video games, so maybe something with those.

But first, they’ll go out to dinner at the Cheesecake Factory, go home to Filipowicz’s and play video games, and document it all. When I leave, they’re still talking about the crabs in the bathroom. They’re just kids, after all.