How videos on YouTube helped A.S.M.R., a hard-to-describe brain-tingling feeling, become a subcultural phenomenon on the internet
The brain-tingling feeling was a hard-to-describe psychological oddity. Until, suddenly, it was a YouTube phenomenon. — When Jennifer Allen watched videos of space … Tweets: @kait_tiffany , @lmatsakis , @lmatsakis , @hautepop , @lmatsakis , and @juliaccarpenter Tweets: Kaitlyn Tiffany / @kait_tiffany : “It was posted in 2009 but languished in the algorithmic scrap heap of YouTube on account of its weak, unsearchable title.” love @jamiekeiles on attention-induced head orgasms and am laughing but also learning... http://www.nytimes.com/... Louise Matsakis / @lmatsakis : ASMR is huge on Instagram, where there are over 6 million posts with the hashtag #asmr. There's also tons of sub hashtags with hundreds of thousands of posts each, like #asmreating Louise Matsakis / @lmatsakis : And ASMR content is huge on Twitch! It's definitely not just a YouTube phenomenon Jay Owens / @hautepop : “The ASMR YouTube subculture is bonded not by belief but rather by an ineffable sensation — perhaps the first time the internet has revealed the existence of a new feeling.” http://www.nytimes.com/... Louise Matsakis / @lmatsakis : This is an incredibly beautiful portrait of ASMR, but I take small issue with this small part https://www.nytimes.com/... pic.twitter.com/54vQnuw2tU Julia Carpenter / @juliaccarpenter : Had to break to my mom this week that no, my little sister isn't “weird,” she's just a normal preteen who medically needs to watch and rewatch videos of people crunching tissue paper!!! http://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
ASMR spent years as what Kaitlyn Tiffany's reporting calls the algorithmic scrap heap: Jennifer Allen's founding 2009 video had a weak, unsearchable title, so the sensation had no handle for viewers to look up. The New York Times piece marks the moment the label stuck — once 'A.S.M.R.' existed as a search term, YouTube's recommendation engine could aggregate a scattered audience into a genre.
The arc matters because it cuts against two other portraits of YouTube in this coverage: the platform whose median video has just 41 views and goes unseen, and the one critics flagged as a powerful radicalizing tool. ASMR shows the same machinery working benignly — turning an unnameable psychological oddity into a subculture with over six million #asmr posts on Instagram and a live presence on Twitch.
First-order effects
- ASMR creators gain a named, searchable genre on YouTube, converting a fringe sensory experience into an addressable audience that advertisers and sponsors can reach.
- Jennifer Allen's coinage stops being trivia and becomes infrastructure: the term itself is what makes millions of videos discoverable across YouTube, Instagram, and Twitch.
Second-order effects
- Adjacent platforms move to host the format rather than cede it — Instagram's six-million-post #asmr footprint and Twitch adoption show the genre migrating wherever attention economies reward it.
- Celebrity entrants like Will Smith and Zac Efron adopting YouTube vlogging, as VICE covered, push the platform's authenticity economy toward the same intimate, direct-to-camera register ASMR normalized.
Third-order effects
- Platform recommendation systems, not publishers or clinicians, become the de facto institutions that decide which human experiences get named, popularized, and monetized — the same power critics warned about in the radicalization debate, here applied to wellness rather than extremism.
- If the pattern holds, obscure subjective states become candidate genres: whoever coins a searchable term first effectively owns a new content category before any institution studies it.
The trend: Recommendation-driven platforms are becoming the naming authority for human experience, converting unsearchable sensations into monetizable content genres faster than science or media can define them.