This 13-Year-Old Girl Earns Rs 66,000 Per Day, Has Millions Of Followers For A Crazy Experience
Makenna Kelly is a 13-year-old girl in the US, splitting her time between Virginia and Colorado. She probably has similar interests to a lot of girls her age. But one thing she certainly does enjoy is entertaining her millions of viewers online.
Makenna Kelly is a 13-year-old girl in the US, splitting her time between Virginia and Colorado. She probably has similar interests to a lot of girls her age, for she she does seem to enjoy dressing up.
Then again, she also enjoys entertaining her million YouTube followers. And she earns $900 per day through advertising.
Images courtesy: lifewithmak2005/Instagram
That's right, Kelly has her own YouTube channel. 'Life with Mak' (which is short for her name but also supposedly stands for Meaning, Acceptance, and Kindness) is only about six months old. Until about May, the channel only had about 600 or so subscribers. Then, on June 3, one video shot her to fame with 11.5 million views, gaining her 600,000 subscribers in a few scant days.
That video was of her eating a honeycomb.
Yeah, that pretty sums up ASMR as a YouTube genre. For those of you that have no idea what I'm talking about that, a video about eating a honeycomb just sounds friggin' weird. For those that do, half of you are probably shaking your heads wondering where we went wrong, while the other are nodding in approval of the unique texture choice. So, allow me to explain.
The mind-boggling experience that is ASMR
ASMR stands for autonomous sensory meridian response. It's basically a tingling sensation you get from your scalp to down your back in response to visual and auditory stimuli. This is usually accompanied by a low-grade feeling of euphoria or satisfaction. It's similar to chills you'd get from listening to a hauntingly beautiful song, though not exactly the same thing. Instead, here you're more likely listening to someone loudly (but with a closed mouth) crunching a packet of potato chips, or maybe tapping nails on a wooden table. Or maybe instead it's watching someone play with slime, or perfectly wipe the dirt off a window pane in steady strokes. It doesn't do it for everyone, and the triggers differ from person, but trust me it's a thing.
For about a year or so now, ASMR artists have taken to Instagram and YouTube in an attempt to entertain viewers with their own brand of triggers. Many of those tend to overlap, like whispering into the microphone, stroking it with a coarse paint brush, or tapping fingernails on various objects. However, they're always trying to stand out of the crowd with their own unique flavour. Hence Makenna Kelly's 'ASMR~ Eating Raw Honeycomb ©¦EXTREMELY Sticky Mouth Sounds!' video, which might actually be a new idea.
Just half a year into her YouTube career, Kelly is doing really well, with over 1.1 million subscribers and more than 87 million views on her channel. After all, ASMR is actually fairly popular across the world, especially so in the US and UK, Korea, Japan, and more. Most people say they watch ASMR as a form of relaxation, or to help them get to sleep at night. Then again, there are at least some members of the community for whom ASMR offers a sort of exual pleasure. Don't take my word for it, simply peruse the YouTube comments sections of said videos.
The darker side
Which brings us to a problem here. ASMR artists are largely women, and that's perfectly okay. They're also taking great pains to look as good as they can. After all, not everyone is watching ASMR with their eyes closed, and the creators are usually sitting just a couple of feet away from their computer at most, in front of their mic setup. Unfortunately, this does tend to draw a crowd with other motives for watching the content than to relax. It's up to the creators themselves here to decide if they're okay with what they encounter in the comments, in order to go on recording ASMR. But when sexual innuendo, or sometimes outright statements, are directed at a 13-year-old, you gotta wonder if someone should be keeping a closer eye on the situation.
Looking through her videos, it seems Kelly is also trying to keep up with ASMR as a whole by diversifying. She's put out Mukbang videos, a Korean phenomenon where a video creator eats a meal while interacting with their audience, usually telling a story. Kelly's also tried out slime playing, lip gloss application sounds, as well as ASMR outdoors in nature. She's even tried out roleplay, where she pretends to be a waitress, dentist, librarian, cashier, but always a sassy character. They're always reminiscent of skits kids tend to put on when playing by themselves, complete with complete outfits for the occasion. She's having some good clean innocent fun, fake insulting the viewer with more teenage disdain than she actually has yet.
One of her latest in September was for a "Sassy police officer". That particular video though, based on the comments it's received, has made at least some of her followers uncomfortable. They felt it came off a little too sexual. A matter of personal taste, but that becomes a little more alarming when you consider the creator is still in eighth grade.
Then again, hundreds of supporters rose to defend Kelly as well, declaring that anyone who found it weird was just projecting their own insecurities on a little girl. "All she did was put on a costume" was the general consensus.
Audio pleasure or audio "pleasure"?
At the end of the day, it's people that view ASMR as a relaxing activity versus people who don't, and that's the main gist of it. Unless you're into ASMR, it's inherently weird, and therefore easy to think of as sexual. Whether it is or not is likely more dependent on each individual creator and their intentions while filming.
But the reason we find ASMR so weird is because we can't explain it. There's a scientific description of what the effect is, but no real explanation behind what causes it. The fact that it's not universal either makes it even harder to come to grips with.
It's gotten to the point where last year YouTube began demonetizing these videos, losing ASMR creators a lot of money. Even China acted this year, banning the practice entirely on streaming platforms saying it was "vulgar and pornographic." And just last month, several ASMR creators had their Paypal accounts (usually linked to a Twitch stream for donations) permanently suspended citing restrictions against payment for "sexually oriented materials or services."
All of this taken into consideration, it's not hard to see why the entry of a child into the world of ASMR, and her quick rise to the top, elicits confusion and alarm. People immediately start wondering if she's being exploited, especially since her mother appears in a lot of her videos. They wonder if she knows what she's doing, if she's really "doing" anything at all.
In the meantime, though, Makenna Kelly is enjoying her stint as the newest superstar of ASMR. In fact, the only thing that gives her pause is her schoolwork, which ends up slowing down her uploads. Other than that, let's hope any doubt is just imagined and she's doing just fine, enjoying her fleeting teenage years.