A Gillette family’s YouTube channel chronicling everyday life on a Wyoming ranch has proven both popular and profitable. 

Mike Galloway, his wife, Erin, and their kids produce the popular channel called Our Wyoming Life on their family ranch about 10 miles south of Gillette. They were inspired to start a channel to show the realities of life on a ranch, and they were aware of the powerful potential viral impact of simple videos like kids unboxing toys.

Their first video was roughly four minutes long, shot on an iPhone. That set them along the road to managing a brand and business much larger than simply their acreage south of town. The channel now has 196,000 subscribers, including one recently posted video with more than 10,000 views in just 19 hours. Their videos, more than 600 in total, have generated more than 31 million views.

They have fans.

Mike Galloway was in Albertsons and a woman followed him through the store.

He said he asked her if he could help her.

“She said, ‘I just wanted to tell you that my family and I moved here, and your videos helped us do that,’” Galloway said.

Right there in front of the deli counter in Albertsons, they ask another customer walking by to take their picture.

“This lady takes our picture and she can tell something is going on,” Galloway said. “She hands me back my phone and says, ‘Who are you?’ And I was like, ‘I’m nobody, it’s fine.’”

Occurrences like that don’t seem all that strange to Galloway and his family these days.

They’re used to seeing people wearing their merchandise. They’re used to people trying to snap their picture when recognized in public. Galloway said his kids don’t think twice about the event they host on their ranch, where 150 people from all over the country come to visit.

His 10-year-old wants to be a YouTube star, he said. That’s hardly unique in this day and age. Tons of high-schoolers and college students want the same thing. But it’s unique in the sense that she’s come of age as a part of a successful YouTube channel.

It’s hard to say to the child, “That’s a long shot,” with the way their lives function nowadays. It’s also tricky trying to shield kids from the more unseemly parts of the internet, which don’t always spare the Galloways when it comes to hateful comments and things like that. The bad comes with the good, he said.

For Galloway, the main takeaway of YouTube success has been not squandering the opportunities provided by the channel’s popularity.

“I think it’s essential to build a business around it or else you’re just inflating your own ego,” Galloway said.

And so they have. They ship beef jerky all over the country. They hope to negotiate deals where they could cost-effectively ship beef to fans who feel a connection and want to help them out. They do speaking engagements. They have sponsorships.

Such is the power of social media. This is the new look of an otherwise small-time family ranch in Wyoming. The ranch and the YouTube channel coexist in a state of symbiosis. The daily workings of the ranch provide content for the channel. The channel, and its nearly 200,000 subscribers, provide opportunities and income that allows the ranch to continue on in ways that it couldn’t otherwise.

“Without having us falling into the YouTube thing, the ranch wouldn’t be here,” Galloway said.