Roman Atwood, the king of family vlogs & Smile More

Meet Roman Atwood.

If you don’t know who he is, you probably don’t watch family vlogs on YouTube. He has 15.6M subscribers on his family channel and over 10 Billion (that’s billion with a B) views across his two main channels: RomanAtwood (renamed from Sketch Empire) and Roman Atwood Vlogs (family channel).

Humble Beginnings

Roman Bernard Atwood was born in 1983 and grew up in Ohio.

He started creating videos very early in high school before YouTube was even a thing. He was often regarded as the high school class clown pulling pranks on his classmates and sometimes filming them and making home DVDs to remember the memories. The pranks were mostly family friendly like surprises or innocent high school pranks, but nothing with a large production - that would come quite later.

In 2006, he started compiling his pranks and eventually called it The Nerd Herd which he sold to the Warped Tour in 2006 in DVD format. Here’s an early video from 2006 about The Nerd Herd.

Nerd Herd was a troupe of some childhood friends who loved making people laugh. The group consisted of some friends and was largely unknown outside of Ohio. From the video above, you can get a sense of what type of content they made as a bunch of high school and then college kids. At the time Roman was in his mid 20s along with his friends but YouTube was just barely a company so as you can see this video was posted to Myspace. The group Nerd Herd disbanded in 2008 and then in 2010 Roman moved onto create Sketch Empire where he would make his name.

Moving to Sketch Empire

After Nerd Herd disbanded, Atwood wanted to continue making sketches and doing pranks so he turned to his childhood friend Chase Gilroy who he’d known since kindergarten. The two of them then reached out to some pranksters via Craigslist (remember this site? It was used to actually meet people and now just have garage sales back then) to put together a troupe of people.

The people included Gilroy, Atwood, Dennis Roady, Greg Painter, Jeff Williams, and Jon Cormany. Titled Sketch Empire meant exactly that, filming sketches together and putting them out to the internet. As a group, they came together in 2010 and made a YouTube Channel which at the time was titled Sketch Empire (but then renamed to RomanAtwood about 5 years later). The content was simple, make sketches and upload them to YouTube consistently. Their schedule was to film over the weekend and uploaded every Tuesday. They started with an epic cooler prank and didn’t miss an upload for over a year. Here’s their first video:

This channel now has over 10M subscribers but at the time was fairly new and one of the first prank channels on the platform in 2010. You can see from his content that some of the pranks were borderline mean and sometimes caught people off guard but the intent was to entertain others. The channel was at its peak one of the most re-shared and watched channels on YouTube.

In 2010, there were no such things as vlogs and this kind of quick reactions, prank content ruled YouTube. It was a place for short form content where people would quickly be entertained and then move on to the next cat video or the famous video that is the latest NFT, Charlie bit my finger.

The channel featured pranks of every type and raked in views by the millions. It was also one of the most reshared channels as much of the video started being reshared across websites as many people would text friends about the funny video content as well as share it on Tumblr or the early days of Facebook.

“OMG check this out” or “Haha this is funny” texts galore as many people were seeing the prank for the first time. Here’s a quick screenshot of the channel’s most viewed pranks: almost 50 videos have over 20M views. An insane mark to hit for any channel especially one that is more than 5 years old.

That said, some of the pranks were borderline legal. Now quick disclaimer, I don’t agree with the content that Roman produced here but the man (and the whole team) knew how get views one way or the other. If you want to learn more, Roman and crew were often criticized for sometimes going too far and he was actually involved in a civil case at one point in time. But this article won’t focus on that - go google him if you want to learn more about that - we’ll focus on his growth a few years later.

2013 - Launching Smile More

With the intent of making laugh and smile at the content, Roman Atwood launched the Smile More merchandise store. His girlfriend Brittney (who would eventually become his wife) and him launched the Smile More merchandise store for their avid growing fan base. The idea was simple: support the creator & the team behind the operation by buying merch and repping the brand.

With a simple message, a merch line and an army of fans, Roman and Britney also decided to tag team efforts and then started a new channel to focus on themselves. From there, the new family vlog channel was born, Roman Atwood Vlogs. Their first video is a vlog and was uploaded just months after the merch store launch in 2013 and introduces viewers to the Atwood family. At the time it was only a few members but over the next few years the family would grow after the birth of a few more children.

The family vlog content was much better for Roman when it came to business. Pranks by default are not something that brands like and with Roman’s content, it was definitely activities that brands would not want to be associated with. He didn’t suffer from brand deals not coming in but found a niche that worked better for him and really wanted to rebrand himself and his own image by focusing on the family and wholesome activities and not the slapstick humor and pranks. It’s different when you pull a nerf gun prank on your family and friends vs surprising strangers in the hope of a reaction. There is also a level of familiarity your viewers get with you and your family when they continue to see a familiar face. It’s brand building.

When you see Roman and his family, you start to build a relationship with them as if you know them personally. It’s great when it comes to inviting people back to the channel to see more content. From a marketing perspective, it’s brilliant because people are entertained by Roman’s content and come for Roman and his family. Over time, you can slowly introduce a brand or do a brand deal with the family because you know the talent (Roman and his family in this case) will enjoy the content.

2015 - Now - A period of Social Growth

In 2015 (and a bit into 2016), Roman and family began uploading daily. There weren’t many people uploading daily content especially daily family content to YouTube. There was Shay Carl who tried doing daily uploads for a few years and then stopped, and a handful of a few others. The most consistent family vlogger who basically reinvented the genre was Casey Neistat who saw a lot of the content that was being put out and made it his own. He’s still regarded as the king of YouTube because he made family vlogs (and vlogs in general) way more interesting.

Back to Roman, it’s hard to say when in 2015-2021, his channel took off. It’s had a steady arc up for years. More recently, we can look at the last few months and see that even with an irregular posting schedule where it’s no longer daily, subscribers keep going up.

The chart is a bit hard to read because the Y axis is wonky, but 16,000K subscribers is the same as 16M subscribers. So even though, the daily vlog content stopped. back in 2018, the sub count has slowly risen over the last 30 months from around 14M subscribers to the current number of 15.6M subscribers.

Closing

Now to close today’s deep dive, I wanted to mention a few things. I purposely didn’t want to talk about the birth of Roman’s kids or show any pictures of them because they’re children. I will say he has 4 children who are all featured in the vlogs in some capacity and makes the vlogs very exciting. It’s almost like seeing them grow up over time. The oldest Noah is a teenager and if you go back far enough, you can see vlogs from when he was just a baby. That life footage is invaluable and will be some great family memories.

Second, Roman and Brittney (his wife) have recently mentioned how they have been receiving threats to their family and are very worried about their family safety. Without going deep into it, it has caused them to take extra precautions on what to upload, it’s forced them to move and hire security to protect their family and loved ones.

It’s one of the unspoken things that comes with fame is people think they know you when they don’t. I did not want to mention those things either as they’re still evolving, but just a quick note that someone’s house, someone’s family is not your place for a selfie. If they’re out at a restaurant, be a human being and sure politely ask them for a photo. If they’re at an event, then yes. But do not be a trash human and follow them to their residence or interfere with family time or life. Sadly, they’ve had to address this inside and outside of the YouTube content.

Third, I also didn’t want to mention any legal proceedings the family is in. They are ever evolving and talking about them would just add fuel to the fire. If you want to know, just google it and be informed.

The Bottom Line

Roman Atwood has had a tumultuous past but he’s turned it around for himself and his family. His switch from pranks to family content is unprecedented but it’s grounded him in reality, made him much much more approachable, respected and probably more talented. There’s a level of dedication it takes to turn the camera on yourself after filming others for a living and an even higher one to commit to publicizing your families life but he’s done it with a smile and unending positivity.

And for that, I’m rooting for ya Roman. And the whole family. They’re good people. Sometimes bad things happen to good people, but if you keep smiling thru the bad times, the bad times eventually end.

With that, smile more everyone.

Here’s a pic from 2016 where I randomly met Roman in Santa Monica.

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