There’s no way to ignore Sam Golbach from the famous internet duo Sam and Colby. Since 2013, the two friends have broken the internet with their entertaining and sometimes jarring videos on the now-disappeared Vine platform. They eventually moved to other platforms, extending their social media reach to YouTube, Instagram, and more recently TikTok, amassing an impressive following in the US and worldwide.
These days, Sam and Colby are not only famous as a duo, but also thanks to their separate projects, but what’s the real story behind their fame? And what’s Sam’s life like when he’s not sharing the cameras with Colby? Keep reading to find out.
Who Is Sam Golbach?
Samuel Golbach was born on 27 November 1996, in Kansas, USA. His parents are Kirk and Cindy Golbach, while his older sister is named Allison and his younger brother is Ben. Sam matriculated from the Overland Park-based Blue Valley High School in 2015.
From a young age, Sam was involved with music and band activities at school, leading him to meet Colby Brooke in middle school, though didn’t become friends right away. In high school, Sam and Colby were in the same group of friends but didn’t bond with each other until they got into a summer band camp, realizing right away that they got along very well.
During that summer camp, Colby and Sam revealed to each other that they liked the same girl and often bonded over their shared attraction for her, but refrained from directly talking to her due to their shyness. That’s how they soon came up with the idea of going to the mall to try to pick up girls, slowly but surely developing more nerve to talk to strangers.
Though their initial idea was to talk with girls, their small experiment helped the pair to overcome their shyness and ‘step out of their comfort zone’, as Sam and Colby explained in a video from 2015.
How Did Sam Start On Social Media?
Given how Sam and his best friend Colby have produced content together from their early internet days, their careers as social media influencers have always been tied to each other.
Back in their high school days, Sam and Colby had already overcome their shyness and were reaching their goals of becoming outgoing people. In December 2013, the pair started an account on the now-defunct Vine app, on which they shared videos asking people random questions at the mall and taking part in challenges, on top of their ‘public disturbance’ videos.
As Sam and Colby described in a 2016 YouTube video, their old Vines were ‘controversial’ and didn’t leave the best impression on many people who stumbled upon their content back in the day. However, they also admit that their idea was to get people to talk about them by any means necessary, focusing on their goal of getting themselves out of their native Kansas. As they described it, it was ‘Sam and Colby versus the world’, given their rebellious and out-of-the-box ways of making themselves known.
In November 2014, Sam and Colby started their YouTube channel with the sole purpose of doing ‘anything and everything’ to entertain their audience, as they confessed in their intro video to their channel. The move to YouTube served the duo well, as in 2017 the Vine app shut down for good.
Internet Fame
Sam and his best friend Colby started their careers as online content creators by doing a wide variety of comedy-focused videos. Nonetheless, soon enough they found their niche audience in the ghost and haunting categories of YouTube, sharing their first video of this type in April 2015, when Sam and Colby visited an abandoned house and acted as if they were attacked by an evil ghost.
At the end of the video, the pair cleared up that it was only an attempt to make a serious video, which was very different from everything they’d done at that point. That first video was their first on YouTube to reach a million views, thus they were encouraged to visit allegedly haunted places and paranormal activities while documenting everything on videos.
View this post on Instagram
It was their haunted videos which ultimately turned Sam and Colby into internet sensations, gaining them over 11 million subscribers up to this date on their joint YouTube channel. One of the greatest moments for the duo was their ‘Conjuring’ series, which premiered in 168 movie theaters across the US in November 2023, marking a huge milestone for Sam and Colby.
Sam’s success extends beyond his content with Colby, as his YouTube channel has gained over 2.7 subscribers, added to the almost five million followers he has on Instagram and TikTok combined.
Controversies
One of the biggest controversies ever faced by Sam Golbach was his arrest in 2019. Back then, Sam, Colby, and fellow YouTuber Ricky Ireland had been exploring the surroundings of a seemingly abandoned school in Tampa, Florida. However, the school wasn’t abandoned but under construction, and thus qualified as government property. After seeing the young men jump the fence, neighbors called the police and had them caught for trespassing.
As reported by Monsters & Critics, Sam, and Ricky were released on a $2,000 bail, but Colby took longer to be freed, given how he had two other charges aside from trespassing, including ‘unauthorized use of a driver’s license’.
While the situation seemed terrible for the pair, in 2020 they told Metro UK that their arrest was a ‘blessing in disguise’, given how it pushed them to be more careful about their content and the way they approached their paranormal investigations. It also motivated them to consult experts before exploring places they had in mind, so ensuring that their content was informational, while keeping the entertaining factor intact.
Personal Life
The most publicly known relationship of Sam Golbach was with Katrina Stuart, a singer and social media influencer. The pair met in 2016 during an event, remaining as friends for a while before taking the next step to become a couple.
Their romance didn’t become public until 2017 when Sam introduced her on his personal YouTube channel, affirming they’d refrained from making their relationship public because they were ‘afraid’ of people’s reaction to it, but ultimately decided to tell the world about their love.
Sam and Katrina often collaborated with each other’s social media posts and videos throughout their relationship, before going separate ways in May 2023, just a year after moving in together. According to a now-deleted video they shared on Katrina’s channel, the reason they split after six years together was that he wasn’t ready to take the ’next step’ in their relationship, thus he decided they were better as friends.
Despite their breakup, Sam and Katrina let their audience know that they had a good relationship while it lasted.
Appearance & Net Worth
Sam Golbach is a man of White ethnicity; his eyes are blue and his hair is blond. Though his page on IMDB says that he’s 4ft 7ins (1.44) tall, other sources state that his height is 5ft 8ins (1.73m); his weight is unclear.
Sam has an estimated net worth of $1.5 million, resulting from his career as a YouTuber and social media content creator, including all the sponsorships he’s gained thanks to it. Also, Sam and Colby own the Sam and Colby Enterprises LLC and the clothing line XPLR, on top of collaborating with retailers such as HotTopic to launch merchandise lines.
Leave a Comment