A trio of emerging YouTube celebrities called 'The Kloons,' are on the edge of internet stardom

How much work goes into making 6-second Vines and three minute YouTube videos?

Spoiler alert: a lot.

Meet the Kloons, a sketch comedy trio that's poured blood, sweat, and tears into their work to hopefully produce lots and lots of laughs.

Late last week, Digiday took a dive into the Kloons' world of YouTube video production to find out what it's like to be on the edge of breaking out into stardom.

"After four and a half years of creating comedy sketches for YouTube, The Kloons have amassed 217,000 subscribers on the video-streaming platform. They create and post two new videos each month, which translates into 460,000 monthly video views for the channel, according to YouTube analytics platform OpenSlate," Digiday reports.

The trio that makes up the Kloons; Mitch Lewis, Greg Washburn, and Nik Kazura, all met in 2004 while studying at the University of California Irvine. When they graduated, all they wanted to do was create sketch comedy. All of them found themselves disheartened by the job application process, and YouTube had become a popular medium in the four years they studied at college. They figured it would be a good place to start posting their work.

Digiday reports,

... first video, "The Pilgrim Project," shows Lewis wandering in and around the subway, acting oddly in front of other New Yorkers. It arrived on YouTube on July 12, 2010, within a week of shooting. Kazoura came out to New York to help film the second video, which is when the group dynamic really clicked. Despite the cross-country distance between Kazoura and the others, it was clear to everyone this was a three-person venture. They called themselves The Kloons - an inside joke of a nickname they sometimes called each other in college.

The Kloons aren't the YouTube celebrities they want to be yet. They've amassed over 200,000 subscribers on their channel - no easy feat - but they haven't reached the "millions of fans" level that internet stars like Bethany Mota have and allow them to make a living off of being YouTubers.

The Kloons are "looking for sustainability," rather than fame or fortune, but they're no Spring chickens, however. They've appeared on the Ellen Show twice in the last year, and Mashable pointed them out as a YouTube channel to watch.

Importantly, they've figured out what works for them, and with that comes a steady increase of fans, demanding to see more.

From the Digiday story,

Their videography has improved, as have their comedic voices. .... Their new hit series is "Sisters," where the group reenacts regular conversations between Kazoura's mom and his aunt, with the actual conversations' audio dubbed perfectly to The Kloons' lip-syncing.

Unlike a lot of the massive YouTubers whose names are as familiar as A-List celebrity's, The Kloons haven't signed up to be a part of a YouTube management platform that markets their work to a widespread audience, but then takes some of the profits for themselves.

"It's the right path for some YouTubers, said Lewis, but no one has presented The Kloons with terms that proved attractive enough to sign on the dotted line," Digiday reports.

Read all about The Kloons on Digiday.