Bumble wedding adds to Cimorelli family fortune

In YouTuber society, one of the latest weddings to garner attention is that of its star athlete and band geek, Max Straneva and Katherine Cimorelli, yet in this case, it’s the band geek that makes them popular.

The wedding featured family only in a large church due to the coronavirus pandemic complicating extra-familial attendance. Max’s and Katherine’s wedding video racked up half a million views on YouTube in its first week online, posted via the Cimorelli family channel. The family’s popularity is anchored in the fandom of the a cappella pop band, Cimorelli, made up of Katherine and four of her eleven siblings.

That fandom, while small compared to that of a 21 Pilots or a Migos, is a cult following with enough dedication to populate detailed pages on each of the band members and aspects of their lives on the Cimorelli Wikia, ranked 7th on Google under the name as a search term. They first came to prominence in 2007, publishing critically acclaimed covers of popular songs.

The wedding furthered the band’s wholesome image as its fans watched Katherine’s chaste kiss at the altar. Die hard fans knew that it was, in fact, Katherine’s first kiss ever, which she confirmed on Instagram in the comments under one of her own pictures.

While Katherine’s fame is more mainstream, as evidenced by her cameo with her sisters as mean girls in the 2018 film, Hope Springs Eternal, Straneva isn’t without a modicum of popularity as an Olympic athlete. A New York track star, Straneva ran cross country for Team USA in 2011 for the IAAF World Cross Country Championships.

Straneva earned his place on the Olympic team when he took second place in the junior men’s 8k race for the 2011 USA Cross Country Championships, trailing behind first place by only nine seconds. Though their careers might never have brought Cimorelli and Straneva together, a dating app could.

Cimorelli and Straneva met on Bumble in late 2017, but she didn’t introduce him to her fans as her boyfriend until 2018, an introduction she made via Twitter and Instagram. By May 2019, they were engaged after Straneva proposed on a beach in Tybee Island, Georgia. Just under a year thereafter, they got married, finally posting their wedding video on October 17.

About two weeks before the video was posted, however, the Cimorelli family channel also posted a video of Katherine’s younger sister, Lisa, browsing for wedding gowns in preparation for her own wedding. It was only two years ago that they were celebrating Christina Cimorelli’s wedding.

In a generation of 11 siblings, the family continually celebrates engagements and weddings and similarly monumental milestones that bring in considerable viewership for the family channel. In contrast, Straneva brings no siblings and thus no brothers- or sisters-in-law to the family.

The channel has been active for 11 years. Last year, the Cimorellis released one of their most popular videos to date—a decade-long retrospective of all their old videos. That video currently has well over 3 million views.

Viewership and subscription base are two key factors that contribute to the market value of advertisement slots on their videos and the pages that load them. Certain life-changing moments like engagements, weddings, adoptions, pregnancy announcements, infidelity apologies, new pets and others tend to be among the most viewed videos a YouTuber has regardless of how many subscribers they have. These are called “gotcha days” when it comes to adoption videos, and that term has been increasingly trending on Google since 2016 as thousands of these videos dot the Internet.

The individual members of Cimorelli might actually occupy the 32% or 35% tax brackets were it not for YouTube. The income from the family channel could ensure that each of them, filing separately or jointly with their respective spouses, can likely be in the highest bracket, which applies to all who earn at least $622,050 jointly ($518,400 single).

Weddings represent fairly sizable spikes in viewership for most YouTube creators, and the Cimorelli family channel is no exception. This wedding comes sandwiched between two others, one of which is yet to come, and a week after they released the wedding video, the family uploaded another entitled, “Our Problems with Toxic Wedding Culture.”

It suggests the family long ago figured out how to most efficiently monetize tradition itself and now uses it to shore up financial comfort for its individual households.