There are 267 videos on our YouTube channel. The most-watched one, by a distance that is almost embarrassing, is the one we had nothing to do with.
A customer climbed onto his roof, wired an anemometer up next to his Atlas so you could see the wind speed as it turned, pointed his phone at it and pressed record. That clip has now been watched 5.4 million times.
Here it is. No music, no voiceover, no edit.
The clip. Filmed by the owner, on his own roof, with an anemometer wired up beside the turbine — watch it on YouTube.
The gap is the interesting part
It is not that the customer clip did well. It is how far ahead of everything else it is.
The next most-watched video on the channel — one of ours, about the low-wind blades — has 282,000 views. After that: 265,000. Then 253,000. Then 210,000. Perfectly respectable numbers for a company that sells wind turbines.
One customer with a phone out-performed our entire back catalogue by roughly nineteen to one — and reached about 340 times as many people as we have subscribers.
We have lighting. We have a factory floor we are proud of. We have people whose job is to make our products look good, and they are good at it. None of it came close.
Why we think it happened
The honest answer is uncomfortable: it beat our videos because they are our videos.
When a manufacturer films its own product working perfectly, you discount it automatically, and you are right to. Of course it works in our footage — we chose the day, the wind, the angle and the edit. Everybody watching knows that, which is why the polish works against us rather than for us.
The man on the roof has no such problem. He paid for it. He has no reason to make it look better than it is. And he did the one thing we would probably have been too nervous to do: he put a live wind reading in shot, so you can judge the output against the conditions yourself instead of taking anyone's word for it.
What people are really asking
We suspect the 5.4 million are not asking whether the Atlas is a good turbine. They are asking something far more specific: would that work on my house?
A studio cannot answer that. A slightly shaky clip of an ordinary roof, in ordinary weather, somewhere that looks a bit like where you live — that answers it. The one thing a production budget cannot buy is somebody else's roof.
So we are going to stop competing with it
The obvious reaction to a customer video beating your marketing is to make marketing that looks like a customer video. We are not going to do that. It would be a lie, and it would show.
Instead: if you own a TESUP turbine and you have filmed it — running well, running badly, being installed, riding out a storm, sitting still on a flat calm day — we would like to see it, and with your permission we would like to publish it. Unedited is fine. Unflattering is fine. It is worth more to the person deciding than anything we can produce ourselves.
If you were one of the 5.4 million
And you are now wondering about the practical side: the payback sum depends entirely on your wind and your electricity price, so there is a calculator on the Atlas page rather than a number here that would be wrong for most of you.
Five million views is a strange kind of feedback. It is not a survey and it is not a sales figure. It is a very large number of people looking at a turbine on somebody else's roof and wondering about their own — and it took a customer with a phone to show them.