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This Woman Says Videotaping Herself Eating Food Online, aka Mukbanging, Made Her A Millionaire

This Woman Says Videotaping Herself Eating Food Online, aka Mukbanging, Made Her A Millionaire

mukbanging

Bethany Gaskin has eaten her way to a $1 million payday. Well, by mukbanging to be exact. Mukbang is a combination of the Korean words for “eating” and “broadcasting” and it’s when someone devours food while videotaping themselves. And the noisier and sloppier they eat, the more viewers seem to like it.

Gaskin’s specialty is eating seafood, though she does chow down on other food items occasionally.

What’s behind this social media phenomenon? “ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) videos — mindless, soothing sights and sounds that trigger tingles in the brain — are the televisual tonic of the social media age; sweet, obliviating stimulants that calm frayed nerves and withered attention spans,” The Hustle reported.

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And her two YouTube channels — Bloveslife and BlovesASMR Eating Her Way — have just the right amount of ASMR to have millions of viewers tuning in to see her eating huge crab legs, potatoes, hardboiled eggs drenched in her special Bloveslife sauce that people rave about.

“Her most popular “mukbang video — 36 minutes and 34 seconds of crab-cracking, lip-smacking, napkin-lacking wonder — has 11.7 million views,” The Hustle reported. She has 1.8 million subscribers and according to the New York Times, she has earned her more than $1 million from advertising on the channels. On top of that she has celebrities like Cardi B mesmerized by her videos, which are most often done out of her Cincinnati home. Gaskin also has nearly 1 million Instagram followers as well.

“I think of mukbanging as a ministry,” Gaskin told the NYT. “I knew this was it, and I quit [my job] by faith.” Gaskin has an associate’s degree in early childhood development and previously owned a daycare facility, which she later sold. After that, she worked making circuit boards for the military for a year.

“Then I did a mukbang, and people just went crazy,” she said. “I was like, ‘People want to see me eat, this is weird,’ and since they were easier to record, I just started doing mukbangs and all of a sudden, it just took off from there,” Gaskin told NYT.

Gaskin’s husband, Nate, later quit his job at General Electric to work as his wife’s full-time manager.