David's Farm Rocks Canada

I am fascinated by the story of Davidsfarm. A popular Youtube channel.

David Rock of London Canada is a self-confessed redneck who has become a Youtube star by making badly edited, shaky videos of himself and his redneck friends jumping cars and performing dangerous stunts with no safety equipment.

He is currently the most viewed Youtuber in Canada and one of the top viewed channels in the world. And since he’s a Youtube partner, he’s making money doing it. A lot of money. In fact, he claims to make more than 10 thousand dollars a month out of his Youtube channel.

The remarkable thing is that it happened almost by accident. The story goes that David started his channel as a means to find his children, who were apparently taken away from him many years ago. He surmised that if he could become well known enough in Canada through his videos, his children would hear of him and maybe put two-and-two together and come looking for him. So far that hasn’t happened. But in the process he has become something of an internet sensation.

Part of this might have been luck, but he obviously has an intuitive knowledge of the viral internet because he knew what videos people would want to watch. He knew that people wanted something original, something with a bit of a story and according to dave, something longer than 1 minute.

His first success was a video called the Redneck Rollercoaster. This is a contraption built out of an old car with a seat and a pair of moose antlers welded to the front. The video features this vehicle doing extremely unsafe “wheelies” much to the amusement of Dave and his buddies. That video alone has garnered millions of hits and it put davidsfarm on the Youtube map.

Since then he’s produced thousands of videos, done hundreds of stunts, races and countless other acts of random chaos. All of it posted up on Youtube and all of it making 3 or 4 cents per view for Dave. And that adds up.

The amazing thing is that this channel seems to have taken on a life of its own. What started out as a collection of crazy videos, now has the makings of a prime-time reality TV show. Drama came to Davidsfarm first when details of his shady past surfaced. Then, when a redneck friend broke his back jumping a mobile home at the farm. Now David Rock has a number of law suits against him, but this only serves to boost publicity in what seems to be a runaway train that may or may not come to a fiery end, like one of Dave’s videos.

The lesson is that, on the internet you don’t need to be anything in particular. Anyone with good content can attract viewers. And on the internet, that can translate into bucks.