Internet hater, viral content creator
The Swedesboro native has over 2.3 million followers across YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok and is responsible for the viral Timothée Chalamet look-a-like competition.
It was the Saturday before the NFC Championships and about six dozen mostly Gen-Z boys had gathered in New York City’s Columbus Circle to watch another much-awaited matchup: YouTuber Anthony Potero beating his high school bully Aiden Wall in a best of three Super Smash Bros. tournament.
Nearly every attendee had their phones out, filming Potero as he filmed himself. A man dressed as the Pokémon Squirtle attempted to play the crowd out on the saxophone to no avail; a line had formed to take photos and shoot bite-sized interviews with Potero.
The resulting video has been watched more than 570,000 times on Potero’s YouTube channel — significantly more than what one might expect for something like this, but far less than Potero’s more outlandish bits, which can rack up millions of views.
Potero has staged an elaborate alien hoax in Florida, been fined by the New York Police Department for organizing the trendsetting Timothée Chalamet look-a-like contest, and even taken on challenges from Philly’s own Chicken Man after eating a bucket of cheese balls on camera all in hopes of going viral. Most of the time the effort is worth it.
“I always knew I wanted to be someone people talk about, not just someone people watch,” Potero said. “I want what I do to be a larger part of the zeitgeist.”
Potero, 23, grew up outside of Philly in Swedesboro and started creating social media content in the film studio at the Gloucester County Institute of Technology, where he had his first brush with internet fame. Nine years later, Potero has over 2.3 million followers across YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, thanks in part to a sprint of irreverent — and sometimes money-losing — stunts.
» READ MORE: Philly’s ‘Chicken Man’ to NYC rip-off: Fight me
Potero’s videos speak to the essence of creating content in 2025, when creators jump from platform to platform or shtick to shtick to stay relevant amid potential bans and oversaturation. He’s also part of a generation of young people who view content creation as a viable, if elusive, career path.
Over 57% of Generation Z wants to be a full-time influencer, according to an oft-cited Morning Consult poll from 2023, spawning classes at colleges across the United States about the skills it takes to build and monetize an online presence.
In reality a lot of young people make content. They just don’t earn money from it. Only 13% of creators make more than $100,000 a year, influencer agency NeoReach found, with the majority earning less than $15,000 a year from their content. The grind causes many to give up.
Even Potero wasn’t immune to being run off the hamster wheel of content creation. After graduating from Rutgers University in 2023, he quit social media to work as a creative producer for mega-famous and mega-controversial content creator Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson. He lasted four months before leaving to revive his own channels.
“If I wanted to make money, I would buy real estate and start renting it or work a corporate job,” said Potero, who works out of the garage of a Jersey City rowhouse he rents with friends. “I’m doing this because I hate the internet right now and I want to make it more fun.”
Running the content creation hamster wheel
Some say it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill. Potero started clocking his in high school.
Potero describes himself as a “very online child” who roamed the internet with little supervision. He would post a video a day on YouTube of himself playing video games during his freshman year of high school, but got his first break a year later with 1 Minute Talk Show, a rapid-fire interview show that Potero started at Gloucester Tech with Wall (yes, the aforementioned bully).
The show accumulated 250,000 Instagram followers. Soon after, the duo’s relationship soured, culminating in Potero transferring to Kingsway Regional High School for his senior year and starting his YouTube channel “out of spite.”
“We were both extremely competitive and visionary people who liked things to go a certain way,” said Wall, 24, who still hosts 1 Minute Talk Show, which now has 1.17 million YouTube subscribers.
Wall drove nearly two hours from South Jersey to film with Potero and was fine with being branded as the bully, even though the duo has been friendly since 2019, when both started college. During the shoot, Potero managed four videographers tasked with capturing b-roll, crowd footage, and close-ups of the video game. One was a friend from college. Two others were fans.
The content creator didn’t always have a team. Potero studied business analytics at Rutgers but spent most of his time shooting and editing videos or fielding advertising deals. Some months, he’d earn thousands of dollars. Others, Potero wouldn’t see his friends much unless they filmed elaborate schemes with him, like starting a D-list K-pop group.
» READ MORE: Philly’s graduating college influencers face a choice: Adult online or ghost their followers?
“There would be times in college where we lived together and I wouldn’t see him for a week because he’d be working 14-, 15-hour days,” said Kieran Burns, 24, an engineer who grew up next door to Potero in Swedesboro and attended Rutgers with him. “I see a lot of the work that Anthony puts in on the back end and it’s not a life I would live.”
Going broke on an alien hoax
There’s a misperception, even among other young people, that influencing can be a mindless gig. That’s according to Pennsylvania State University professor Jenna Spinelle, who teaches a class on the business and strategy of content creation.
“I don’t think students realize that [content creation] can get real serious real fast,” said Spinelle, who requires her students to develop a business plan for a content creation venture by the end of the semester. “You can’t just do day-in-the-life vlogs or ‘get ready with me’ content.”
Potero’s concepts start in his garage office, where props and camera equipment are strewn across cluttered desks and industrial shelving. A whiteboard is scribbled with video ideas like to literally search for a needle in a haystack.
Potero oversees a staff of four paid interns and a full-time assistant, spending about half of his earnings on payroll and business expenses. Most of his income comes from partnerships, TikTok Creator Awards Program payouts, and ad revenue from commercials that run during his YouTube videos, which Potero said varies considerably month to month.
“There will be some months where we’re in the red like $10K and then some months when we’re in the green like $20K,” said Potero, who declined to provide specific earnings. ”I would personally make more in a corporate job.”
Some of his most viral videos lost money: Potero spent around $7,000 on an oversize alien head, cheap CGI, and a video from Star Trek II actress Laura Banks to stage alien sightings in Tampa, Fla., last February.
Spinelle believes the immediate return on investment dissuades most young people from sticking with content creation, even if they have a passion for it.
“You start a YouTube channel or newsletter or an Instagram account and like no one subscribes and you lose interest,” she said. “You think, ‘This is a lot of work and I’m not getting anything from it,’ so you quit.”
More money, different problems
It can seem like the creator economy runs on economies of scale: The more money a person has to spend, the more successful they will be at making it online. MrBeast — who has 373 million YouTube subscribers, the most on the platform — claims to spend about $2.5 million per video.
When Potero moved to Greenville, S.C., to create short-form content for MrBeast, he found that more money didn’t necessarily allow for more creative vision. Donaldson rejected Potero’s idea for the Chalamét look-a-like contest, Potero said, in favor of bits like dropping metal pipes on school buses.
“MrBeast doesn’t know anything I don’t know. Not in an egotistical way. There’s just no sauce there,” Potero said. “His content cannot be artistic by design because like 300 million people need to be able to understand it.”
Potero has also been accused of lacking sauce: Alexander Tominsky — who went viral for eating rotisserie chickens on abandoned Philly pier — challenged Potero to a fight in December after alleging Potero stole the premise of his idea by eating cheese balls in New York City’s Washington Square Park.
Potero actually credits Tominsky in his video about the cheese ball stunt, which has been viewed 2.2 million times. He also reached out to Tominsky, according to messages reviewed by The Inquirer, to pitch him on starting fake internet beef for charity.
Most of that is beside the point, Potero argued. The beauty of the internet is that people run with each other’s ideas and improve upon them.
“It’d be different if I was making true art, like if I had painstakingly spent thousands of hours making an animated show and somebody had bar for bar taken what I did,” said Potero. “But the look-a-like contests [that happened after mine] have given so many people core memories, and I’m just grateful to be a part of that. And I think that’s the energy people should have.”
After beating Wall in Smash Bros. on that Saturday in January, Potero hung around Columbus Circle to take photos with admirers and answer questions about what it takes to make it as a content creator. Later, Potero told The Inquirer he wouldn’t recommend his job to anyone.
“This is a career where you just sell ads. That’s all content creation is,” said Potero. “You can probably find as much whimsy and joy in some random bagel shop job and live a less stressed life.”