“Eating
Raw
Honeycomb –
EXTREMELY
Sticky
Mouth
Sounds”
085 eating cookies and milk. In an 11-minute video, Kelly
tapped on the biscuits with her pink fingernails
before biting into them and slurping them down
with a jar of milk. More than 300,000 watched it.
Kelly’s mum, 40-year-old veterinary physician
Nichole Lacy, only found out about her daughter’s
channel a month after it was created, at which point
she started to monitor it daily, handling the email
requests. (Kelly is no longer allowed to look at the
emailed requests she gets – two of which were
“inappropriate” and promptly deleted.)
Life with MaK currently has nearly 1.3 million
subscribers – which means that Kelly has a lot of
money. The teenager earns revenue from adverts
that play on her YouTube channel (estimated at
$500 per day), plus sponsorships from brands and
payments for custom videos. She was named one
of Teen Vogue’s “21 under 21” in November 2018.
But the biggest ASMR artist, or “ASMRtist”, on
YouTube is 21-year-old Taylor Darling – aka ASMR
Darling – who has more than 2.1 million subscribers
and earns an estimated $1,000 a day in advertising.
Global megabrands such as IKEA, Sony, McDonald’s
and Toyota have all created ASMR-inspired adverts,
and in October 2018, platinum rapper Cardi B made
an ASMR video that has gone on to be viewed more
than 13 million times. It’s no longer surprising
that 75 per cent of children want to be YouTubers,
but these kids don’t want to be the next beauty-
blogging Zoella or game-streaming PewDiePie. They
want to be the next brain-tingling ASMR Darling.The term ASMR was coined in 2010 by Jennifer
Allen, a 39-year-old who works for a cybersecurity
company. “For years I had thought, ‘Jeez, maybe I
have a brain tumour or something,’” she recalls. “If
you don’t have an answer for a bodily phenomenon
you kind of fill in the blanks eventually.”
From 1999 onwards, Allen searched steadfastly
for others like her online. In the late noughties,
she stumbled upon a SteadyHealth.com forum in
which a user named okaywhatever51838 discussed
a “weird sensation” that “feels good”.
“Nobody had any answers, so I decided to try to
help everyone co-ordinate,” says Allen, who created
a Facebook group to spread the term that she had
come up with. “It’s been an exponential rise since
then. I think because it’s a genuine experience that
many people never had a way of qualifying before.”
For outsiders, ASMR has always been weird. “One
thing that’s interesting about the ASMR experience
is that it’s about close personal attention,” says Dr
Giulia Poerio, of Sheffield University’s psychology
department, who has undertaken multiple ASMR
studies. Role-play videos are a thriving industry
in the ASMR community – online, you can watch
someone pretend to be your dentist, masseuse,
or even a receptionist checking you into a hotel.
“They’re basically a simulation of what would
happen if you got ASMR in real life,” Poerio explains.
“Multiple triggers are layered to get an effect.”On June 3 2018, Makenna Kelly, a 13-year-old
from Fort Collins, Colorado, uploaded the video
that propelled her to internet stardom. Entitled:it featured the teenager chewing fistfuls of pure
honeycomb directly in front of a microphone for 16
minutes. In the following months, it was viewed 12
million times. By October, Kelly (pictured left and
previous spread) had a million YouTube subscribers.
“I jumped all around and I celebrated with apple
cider and it was just really, really fun... I got hy-per,”
she laughs, stressing the syllables.
The video was for those who experience “ASMR”.
Short for “autonomous sensory meridian response”,
ASMR is a euphoric feeling certain people get from
specific auditory stimuli. Those who experience it
can be triggered by whispering, chewing or tapping
sounds, eliciting bodily responses from feeling
tingles to simply become incredibly relaxed.
“I just tried it because I thought it would help
out my channel, and it did, yeah,” Kelly says of her
honeycomb video. When she started her channel in
March 2018, Kelly made more traditional YouTube
videos – in which she filmed herself applying
make-up and eating different foreign snacks. “It
was exciting,” she says of going viral, “because
I was like, this could actually be my dream. I’ve
always wanted a lot of subscribers.”
While most girls her age earned their pocket
money babysitting, Kelly spent the summer of 2018
in her bedroom, filming 50 custom-made ASMR
videos. She would receive daily email requests from
subscribers to her channel for a bespoke video,
shoot the footage, receive the money over PayPal
(ten minutes cost $50, whereas for $30 – about £23- you’d get a five-minute clip), and upload the video
to her YouTube channel, Life with MaK.
“People asked for really weird things,” she
explains, “like tapping on a TV or playing with
string.” One stranger paid Kelly $50 to film herself
@GIBI.ASMR
AGE: 24
MAJOR: SOFT SOUNDS
1.5M SUBSCRIBERSGibi produces role-play
videos that focus on
resonances that can help
her audience to relax
and drift off to a deep sleep.Left: Makenna Kelly, 13.
Her YouTube channel,
Life With MaK, has nearly
1,300,000 subscribers