Want to go viral on TikTok? You have to dance well, look conventionally attractive, or… be a landscaper.
People with unremarkable jobs — power-washers, hat-makers, beekeepers, and loggers — have amassed hundreds of thousands of followers just by streaming their day-to-day work.
Since when did TikTok become all about normies?
YouTube certainly has its niches (marble racing, anyone?), but its algorithm usually shies away from serving videos of people, say, cutting grass.
But on TikTok, an unsexy job can carry the same cachet as a dance:
- Pool installer Danny Wang’s before/after clips often attract 1m+ views, and have gained him 692k+ followers.
- R&A Tree Service (539.5k followers) racks up millions of views on its videos of workers sawing down large trees.
- Texas Beeworks has amassed 1.7m followers mostly by showing close-ups of bees.
The TikTok algorithm is mostly a black box
We don’t know why the app seems so friendly to landscapers, et al. But R&A Tree Service offers up a hypothesis.
As the company told The Verge, the tree in the video has to be big. If it’s tiny, or even average-sized, TikTok seems to yawn it off.
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