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C3 Laundry Services — a cleaning company located in Accra, Ghana — has 12 employees, 124,000 Instagram followers and more than 6 million likes on TikTok.
The company offers pressure washing, upholstery/rug-cleaning and other laundry services. But over the past two years, owner Samad Abdulai has found a lucrative side hustle as a content creator.
It all started one day when he posted a video clip of himself scraping soapy water from a dirty, white rug on his company’s Instagram account. “It went viral,” he said. “I was shocked.”
Though previous videos he’d posted of shampooing or vacuuming rugs did not receive much attention, that scraping video quickly racked up thousands of views. “That was when I realized people loved those kind of videos,” he said.
After that, he kept posting rug-scraping videos on Instagram and longer videos on YouTube. “It has become so easy — you put a video and just like that it gets a million views.”
Many of those views come from people searching for ASMR content. ASMR stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response and refers to the tingly, goosebump-like sensation some people experience when watching or listening certain stimuli, like pages crinkling in a book, fingernails tapping on a hard surface, or bars of soap sliced up by a razor blade.
Abdulai said YouTube’s monetization program earns him an average of $900 to $1,000 a month. “The more views you get, the more you get paid,” he said. Instagram and Facebook also drive clients to his business.
“It’s like a bonus to what we’re already doing,” he said. Sometimes people pay him for the right to repost his videos on their accounts. “That’s like extra money,” he said.
C3 Rug Cleaning Services, Abdulai’s company, isn’t the only cleaning business earning extra revenue this way. U.K.-based Mountain Rug Cleaning has amassed more than 1 million followers on YouTube. Abdulai said he’s connected with other rug cleaners/content creators in Russia and the United States.
Though he was initially surprised at the popularity of rug-cleaning videos, Abdulai said he now understands why so many people watch them. “I myself have become addicted to my own videos,” he said. “It’s like a meditation … it sounds like the ocean.”
