Facebook’s faceless superstar

He’s like one of those hit songs you’ve heard a thousand times in as many different settings, whose words you know by heart even if you don’t know who sings them.

That’s the man on the ladder.

He ranks high among the most popular content creators on the internet, a social media ATM whose Las Vegas home produces so much TikTok and Facebook gold it’s like the U.S. Mint of killing time.

If you’ve logged on to those apps for more than a few minutes over the past four years or so, chances are you’ve seen him take a power saw to his banister or build a trapdoor in an upstairs hallway or knock out a floor in his house to construct a trampoline room — this magician/sketch comedy artist/spray-painting phenom/home de-improvement aficionado/harvester of billions and billions of views.

Currently, he’s “fixing” a broken ceiling light in his living room, which just crashed to the floor, sending glass shards every which way in a clip from 2023.

Of course, any handyman worth his tool belt and 23.2 million YouTube followers knows what comes next: You bust out a series of five computer-printed Iron Man stencils, spray-paint each one until a perfect recreation of the Marvel superhero looms above and then install a new light designed to look like the character’s signature arc reactor pulsing right in the middle of his chest.

“Yeeesss!” he exclaims as the light is switched on, glowing blue, generating lots of green.

This was the second most viewed TikTok of all last year — on the whole platform, worldwide.

Justin Flom

“Looks great,” notes his wife, Anna Rothfuss, a fellow star content creator, the two of them a social media power couple skilled at putting fleeting online attention spans in a headlock.

The video, which debuted last July, has racked up over 419 million views on TikTok alone.

Ten months later, we stand beneath the painting with its creator, gazing up at one of the more unlikely ways to earn tens of thousands of dollars in only two minutes and 18 seconds, the duration of the video.

“This was the second-most-viewed TikTok of all last year — on the whole platform, worldwide,” he notes. “Totally crazy.”

Crazy?

Not really, not these days — he has this down to a science, backed by data, subjected to extensive focus group testing. There’s real skill involved here, even if it’s all created to look off-the-cuff, this former touring magician — who has appeared on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” numerous times, performed in Madison Square Garden opening for country stars Florida Georgia Line and been anointed “the most viewed magician on the planet” by Forbes magazine — mining that background to create a different kind of magic online: He recently set the record for the most-viewed YouTube Short with a clip that was watched over 1.5 billion times.

In 2020, when he started creating Facebook videos full time, his content was viewed for more than 6.4 billion minutes, placing him in the top five for the year; in January and February 2022, his was the most-viewed Facebook page, a feat he has since repeated, most recently in April.

Despite those numbers, he remains Facebook’s faceless superstar.

“I’m not famous,” he says, “even though I’m getting a billion views a month on YouTube, a billion on Facebook. Nobody knows who I am.”

And that’s just the way he likes it — it’s completely by design, in fact.

Oh, and his name is Justin Flom.

Breaking the internet with magic and spray paint

If these walls could talk, they’d laugh all the way to the bank.

“What should we start with?” Flom asks amid the palatial playland that is his home, where there are circus toys in the backyard — walking balls, a German wheel — a fireman’s pole in the laundry chute, a “gun” room full of rifles and pistols that only shoot water or toy projectiles and handmade doors designed to look like those found in seminal sitcoms such as “Seinfeld” and “Friends.”

There are coin-operated antiques seemingly everywhere, a foam pit bedroom on the second floor and gags galore, from a remote-control phone that “Rick rolls” anyone who answers it to a trick safe hidden behind a portrait of Orson Welles and Lucille Ball that’s loaded with giant spring snakes.

“This was installed just yesterday,” Flom notes of the safe. “I knew that people would spot the hinges on the side of the thing — especially my friends — and they’d open it up. I’m so psyched for this video.”

He has a particular affinity for Welles, a magic aficionado who dabbled in the field when he was younger before becoming renowned for acting and filmmaking.

Flom is following a similar path a century later, and his home speaks to as much: The place is the literal canvas for some of his most popular clips, a series of inventive spray-painting videos in which he brightens the interior of his house with Looney Tunes characters, superheroes and iconic athletes such as Michael Jordan and Muhammad Ali.

In one of his two young daughters’ bedrooms is a painting of sledgehammer-wielding cartoon cat Tom chasing his rodent foil Jerry out of a hole that Flom knocked in the wall.

The video of Flom creating this scene — “Dad fixes hole in kids bedroom!” — was a game-changer.

“This was when spray painting took a real turn for me,” he explains, having painted since he was a kid. “This one’s at like 400 or 500 million (views) now.”

Even mega-popular YouTuber MrBeast was impressed by the clip.

“MrBeast’s team, I found out later, they actually studied this video and scripted it out,” Flom notes. “They wrote out all of the beats of this video, and they called it the greatest YouTube Short ever made.”

These videos tend to follow a familiar pattern: Flom either deliberately or “accidentally” makes a hole in a wall with a hammer only to fix it by, say, painting the Incredible Hulk over the gash in the Sheetrock and filling the indentation with a rubber Hulk fist, which bursts from the wall as if he was punching through the thing.

The ensuing video in this instance — “He fixes the hole in the wall!” — has been watched over 500 million times on YouTube.

“This one was my fastest video,” Flom says, standing alongside the Hulk portrait in a hallway on the second floor of his home. “I don’t even understand that.”

Other paintings of Bugs Bunny complete with a real-life version of his preferred vegetable (“Why you should hide a carrot in your wall,” 485 million views) or a light bulb-enhanced Mickey Mouse (“Dad builds best Night-Light for his kids,” 311 million views) have done similarly mammoth numbers.

“That’s his whole TikTok now: his house and his life,” says Penn Jillette, Flom’s friend and mentor. “He’s one of the magicians who’s really learned to use the new media stuff. He really does thrive at TikTok and thrive at that Instagram kind of magic. He’s one of the ones who’s really leading in how you do magic in that new form.”

‘Don’t be a celebrity; don’t be anybody’

Flom attended his first magic convention when he was 4 months old.

The son of a magician, he was jumping out of a magic box for a trick his dad created by age 2.

Flom still has the scar on the back of his neck that he earned as a kid while attempting to re-create a magic routine involving a guillotine and some flaming rope that he saw on one of David Copperfield’s TV specials in the ’90s.

When he was a teenager, Flom moved from his native Minneapolis to Branson, Missouri, and launched his own magic show, the youngest headliner on the city’s main strip at the time.

Flom relocated to Vegas in 2009 as his career continued to grow: In 2012, he made the first of numerous appearances on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show”; in 2015, he hit the road opening for Florida Georgia Line, doing close-up magic in the crowd before the band hit the stage, making front-row tickets appear inside of a fan’s mouth or refilling somebody’s Bud Light from a crushed beer can.

Early in his Vegas tenure, Flom met fellow up-and-coming magician Rick Lax at Gary Darwin’s Magic Club, an ongoing weekly gathering at the now-shuttered local dive Boomers Bar.

“You would only show up here if you were, like, a legitimate magic nerd,” Lax recalls. “I think we just clicked because I saw that Justin’s serious about this. He’s here to work.”

The two quickly went from friends to business partners: In 2012, Lax developed the Syfy reality competition show “Wizard Wars,” which featured Flom alongside Penn & Teller and others.

Six years later, Lax founded Network Media, a hugely successful content creator company that has earned over 350 billion views since 2020 from its deep pool of creators — among them Flom and Rothfuss, a former singer and performer in “Jubilee” who made a lucrative transition to internet entertainer in 2019.

“I think my first hit I got like an $11,000 check,” Rothfuss recalls, her videos ranging from comedy sketches to her opening packages containing creepy old dolls that she stuffed with her baby teeth. “Every month, the checks were bigger, and I was, like, crying, because it was just kind of life-changing, going from being a nanny and a singer and living paycheck to paycheck to getting these checks.

“And then Justin and I started working together,” she continues, “finishing each other’s sentences, and just really being creatively in tune with each other. We’ve created a lot of really great content together.”

Among their early hits was a series of trendsetting videos in which they ate copious amounts of food on camera while acting annoyed with one another for no apparent reason. Flom also found great success with clips in which he revealed the secrets behind certain magic tricks — even though they seriously angered some of his peers.

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As they were building their blockbuster brand, the two worked closely with Lax, who brought an empirical focus to content creation.

“The beginning ideas of what works all came from Ricky,” Rothfuss says. “He’s the one who was mining data and going, ‘Hey, I’m seeing this kind of thing working.’”

“We were really building a formula,” she elaborates. “We used his data, and we would go out and experiment with a bunch of things, and then he would use our data. We were passing the ball back and forth, creating this way to do this thing that was sort of a surefire way to have success.”

Lax also gave Flom some key advice.

It was clear that Justin was well-positioned to succeed on this new medium.

Rick Lax

“He was the one who came to me and goes, ‘Justin, nobody cares about you’ — and he was saying this as a good friend,” Flom recalls. “Ricky’s theory was different: ‘Dumb yourself down as much as possible. Don’t be a celebrity; don’t be anybody. In fact, be as invisible as possible — just let the idea come through.’

“If fame isn’t the goal,” he continues, “and, instead, money is the goal, money has a metric: views. The more views you get, the more you get paid. The more you get to do this.”

To Lax, Flom was practically destined for online greatness.

“It was clear that Justin was well-positioned to succeed on this new medium,” he says. “Because he was trained since birth as a magician, his whole life he’s been thinking about, ‘How do you get and control attention?’

“And then when you understand what an algorithm is,” he continues, “and how these companies are built around it, you see, ‘Wow, this skill that magicians have for getting and controlling attention, all of a sudden is much more important for the entertainment economy.”

From 2020 to 2023, Flom produced over 2,000 videos.

Donuts, doll heads and trap doors

Justin Flom knew that you really wanted to see a brick hurled into a front-loading washing machine going at full speed before you did.

And he was right: A clip of him doing so earned over 56 million views on YouTube, a modest success by his standards nowadays.

The ability to tap into these unknown desires — where a viewer doesn’t know they want to see something until they see it — is critical for a content creator like Flom, the axis upon which pretty much everything else pivots.

Rothfuss is particularly good at it: Flom cites a video she made earlier in the year in which she cooked a doll head in a waffle iron.

“I did not know until that moment that I wanted to see what a baby doll looks like out of a waffle iron — I didn’t know!” he exclaims. “And guess what? Millions of other people had the same desire that they didn’t know, and they hung out through the video to watch it happen.

“So I have to very quickly introduce an unknown desire that you have,” he says. “‘Do I want to know how this is done?’ ‘Do I want to know how this is made?’ ‘Do I want to see what that thing is?’ And then I have to deliver on that.”

Flom’s job, above all else, is to stop the swipe, to create enough intrigue in the first few seconds of a video to hook you into watching longer — watch time being a key metric to monetizing online content.

“That means I have to be serving you directly what you want,” he notes.

So, how does Flom know that you really want to see his assistant fall through a trapdoor after attempting to grab a doughnut suspended from the ceiling with his teeth? (“Donut Trap Door,” 190 million views).

“We have the algorithm,” he says. “And the algorithm is a big, scary word to some people. But really, the algorithm is not evil, it’s just going to say, ‘What are people watching? And we’ll move that to the top of the feed.’

“What’s unique about me,” he continues, “is that instead of saying, ‘What do I want to do?’ I go, ‘What does the data want to see?’ And I’ll create to that.”

Smashing YouTube records

“Are you ready?” she asks. “I want you to look at three different dresses.”

And with that Anna Rothfuss ducks behind an entryway and spins herself out of a light blue gown into a sparkling silver one, both part of a transforming dress.

“Whoa, that was so fast!” Flom exclaims as Rothfuss hides herself again and then quickly re-emerges in a yellow number. “Wait, wait, I didn’t see it!”

Flom then peers around the corner.

“Where’s the other dresses?” he asks as the clip concludes, wearing an incredulous, borderline dumbfounded look, like a cat that has just been shown a card trick.

The 19-second video, “Real life transforming Cinderella dress,” is not only Flom’s biggest hit, it’s the biggest in YouTube Shorts history, earning that designation this month by surpassing 1.5 billion views.

It seems so simple and feels like there’s almost nothing to it, coming and going as swiftly as a tuft of cotton candy melting on your tongue — and with about as much substance.

This is a big reason why it works.

“The videos look like the type of thing that anyone can do, but there’s a lot going on in them,” Lax says. “Some people might see a video and say, ‘How does this have so many views?’ But, of course, there is a serious art and science behind it, because if it really was random, Justin would not be on the top of YouTube for many months. There is a real method to the madness.”

So what is going on here?

Flom and Rothfuss are creating a highly profitable paradox: staged, manufactured realism, abetted by the clip’s deliberately raw look, which is intended to create the impression that you’re watching something that you’re not supposed to watch.

It’s the social media equivalent of peeking in your neighbor’s windows — sans the shame and potential restraining orders.

“We do vertical video, handheld cameras, no color correction, not really fancy lighting,” Flom explains of his videos’ production values — or lack thereof, in many cases. “All of that is calculated, because we want to communicate to the viewer at home, ‘This is not produced. In fact, this is very real.’ And that’s what increases watch time.”

Even Flom’s attire in the clip — a loose gray T-shirt, jeans — is meant to convey a kind of at-home, on-the-couch nonchalance.

“I wouldn’t wear this on camera,” he says of the wrinkle-free white button-down shirt, designer jeans and bright blue shoes that he’s wearing today. “This is too fancy, because there’s something about when you swipe up on a video and it starts, you kind of want the viewer to be like, ‘I don’t think he wants me to be watching this. Like, he looks pretty bad. I don’t think this is good.’”

We fell in love, and it was actually a really amazing thing, where we went through the most pain together while we were falling in love.

Justin Flom

It also helps that Flom and Rothfuss have a natural chemistry on camera: He’s the handy, handsome guy-next-door, straight out of central casting; she’s similarly funny and photogenic — Flom likens his wife’s often absurdist comedic sensibilities to those of Gilda Radner, an apt comparison.

After a couple of years of working together, their relationship was born of a shared yet ultimately serendipitous sadness: In 2021, Rothfuss was living with her partner in a house across the street from Flom’s home, which she still maintains, when he suddenly passed away.

Around the same time, Flom was going through a divorce.

“Both of us were in this moment of extreme loss at the same time, and we were in the same company doing the same job,” Flom recalls. “We fell in love, and it was actually a really amazing thing, where we went through the most pain together while we were falling in love.”

They were married last year.

Yes, of course, the bride entered the ceremony by swinging down a trapeze-style swing that Flom installed on the second floor of his house.

The data says: More silliness

Magic still informs what Flom calls his “silly internet videos,” even if his focus these days is less on tricks and more on transforming his house into something that would make a Realtor hyperventilate.

“Magic has the widest throw of skill sets — maybe next to circus,” he notes, “meaning when you learn to be a magician, you learn how to be a seamstress and a script writer and an editor and a public speaker and a carpenter.

“And now my job has turned into building a trapdoor,” he continues, “designing a trampoline to go directly into a wall; there’s an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ tunnel of doors where there’s a door inside of a door inside of a door. All of these things require magical thinking.”

They also require a subjugation of the ego: Flom understands that, as an entertainer, you’ll probably take him far less seriously than, say, his accountant does.

“Look, I would love to create high-end content like Aaron Sorkin, but that’s not what the people have said that they want,” he contends. “We have the data. So, if people want to see these really silly videos of me eating a giant plate of spaghetti, or putting in a secret passageway, or revealing a magic secret, don’t have the argument with me. Have the argument with the viewers who are watching it.”

Flom knows the drill: A real artist is supposed to make art for art’s sake, to follow his muse instead of catering to the crowd. To do otherwise is to risk being seen as a hack, pandering to the lowest common denominator — in this case, fickle social media attention spans.

He knows that plenty of people look down at what he does.

He also knows that even more of them are going to watch him do it anyway.

“It’s not artistic in the feel of it, the way that an artist would want to be like, ‘Let me do what I want to do,’” he says of his videos. “(Renowned music producer) Rick Rubin was saying, ‘I never listen to an audience. I make the music I want.’

“Great. We get a lot of good art that way,” he continues. “Also, there is something to be said for creating exactly what people want to watch.”

Five days after our visit, Flom posts the video of his trick safe with the snakes pouring out of it, his wife being the butt of the prank. (“Hidden safe packs a secret surprise!”)

He was right to be psyched about it earlier in the week: The clip has tallied over 54 million views.

It’s exactly what people wanted to watch.

Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @jbracelin76 on Instagram.