The Viral Yard Cleanup Edition

Colin here. YouTube has many nooks and crannies. You can watch people speed run games, you can fall down the chiropractor wormhole of crunches, pops, and corrections (s/o Jack Harlow doing the Ring Dinger). You can watch things being satisfyingly crushed in slow motion. But one category that I have seen recently is a weird bit bit of marketing, good deeds, and yard maintenance, all rolled into one.

There appears to be a cottage industry of people with lawn and yard care companies making videos of labor intensive, pro-bono work on properties that have been neglected. The recipe is simple: Find a property that has fallen into disrepair. Spend a ton of time sprucing it up with a time lapse video. Then, apparently, profit. A few of these videos are doing numbers, to the tune of 23m videos for one:

Here’s another example:

Why is this interesting?

It’s an interesting growth strategy, where the marketing and content value has completely subsumed the actual product being offered. Lawn care is a commodity gig, there is a market price, and plenty of people with the gear and equipment to do it. This particular channel, SB Mowing, started out as an organically growing business that had some early savvy in Facebook and social media marketing. But in the owner’s words:

I always wanted to start a YouTube channel. I even tried a couple of different times, but couldn’t find anything that I loved making videos on. I saw some guys doing lawn care on social media and helping people out for free. This seemed like such a great concept, so I gave it a shot. The only time I had to record was evenings as I was working during the days and mowing clients’ yards on the weekends. So I went and found a few crazy overgrown lawns where people needed some help. I offered to do it for free and worked 3 hours, every evening, for about 2 weeks. These were my first 3 videos.

He’s now clocking 40 million total followers, and around 3 billion annual views, which, even with conservative estimates, is looking like upwards of millions of dollars of revenue. He’s also got a pressure washing spinoff for those that like watching grime being spritzed away. For me, it is yet another niche corner of YouTube that I find fascinating. But it also reinforces the core of modern content marketing: give people what they want to see, rather than what you want to tell them, and hide the medicine in something fun. (CJN)