Ftrain, by Paul Ford

Apr 7, 2016 · Article · Medium

ASMR as a Platform

ASMR as a Platform

Today’s newsletter topic comes from Kevin Barrett, a senior software engineer at Postlight. In a post here on Track Changes he wrote about ASMR—“a silly medicalish retronym that some clever pseudoscientist coined to diagnose — and keep in mind that ASMR is nothing if not hand-wavey — that tingly feeling in the back of your head.”

Interestingly, he points out that ASMR’s weirdness and Internetricity makes it difficult to monetize:

ASMR is interesting for tons of different reasons (
? sleep aid? heretofore undiscovered physiological response?), but we’re Web People, and Web People in watching hours of sweet nothings may notice a curious cynical thing: ASMR doesn’t lend itself well to the only reason anyone is really on YouTube, making money. At most there’s a 15-second ad in front of an hour-long video. Product placement doesn’t work when success is your audience falling asleep. Yet ASMR has grown, year by quiet year. The
have millions of views. The (sigh) content creators guest on each others’ channels, experiment with
, and release the world’s least effective ringtones. All for something that, scientifically speaking, hasn’t been proven to exist.

Read it, watch some videos, feel some tingles.

Bonus, somewhat related link: There’s a podcast called “Sleep With Me” the point of which is to lull you gently to sleep. There are hundreds of them and they go on forever. One episode is a “bedtime tale of a spider who lived his life in a house with a post cyber monday refurbished TV that was always on.”

Below the fold

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