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Maria, a YouTuber aka the Gentle Whisperer, is able to send tingles up and down the spines of her over half a million subscribers. Maria’s videos have logged more than 203.5 million views and she has since quit her nine-to-five administrative job to be a full-time content creator.

In her videos, Maria demonstrates special mannerisms, such as hand movements, which she believes help to regulate the viewing experience. There are also many details that need to be coordinated to create the right atmosphere. Maria, a self-described perfectionist, needs to master the right lighting and the proper distance for microphone placement. She also revealed that she suffers from dysarthria, which means she hates the sounds that come out of her mouth, so she made sure that they did not appear in the video.

She said “I have hundreds of messages from people struggling with something and need an outlet to calm down: veterans messaging about PTSD night terrors, so videos calm them down extremely; misunderstood teenagers who don’t know how to deal with life yet and are stressed out because they don’t know how to deal with pressure; people from all walks of life including firefighters, lawyers, teachers, single mothers.” she told.

ASMR has branched out from the whisper community, which was created sometime in 2009 and 2010. It began with people creating vlogs of themselves whispering about their days against a black background without showing their faces.

Maria has a special knack for pinpointing the things that relax her and adapting them for her gentle whispering videos. Creating new video content can take Maria anywhere from two to 48 hours to pull together.

“A majority of the videos, especially role play or things I have to get props for or personal attention videos, I usually plan out first for a couple of weeks. I do a little bit of scripts, test props I want to use including sounds, outfits and backgrounds to get the vibe I want to go with.”

According to Maria, the ASMR community has grown exponentially in the past two years, allowing her and other ASMR artists to pursue it full-time. However, when Maria first began watching ASMR videos there was no ASMR community and no term for ASMR. She recalled:

“For about two years different media outlets have been featuring us and other YouTube channels are finally recognizing us and talking about us. It happens from time to time. Ashton Kutcher commented on ASMR “Things like that brings us much closer to people.“

Though she likes to think that everyone has ASMR, Maria says that individuals feel it at varying degrees and may experience it with different triggers. According to the monthly analytics that Maria receives about her viewers, 51% of them are males who are 35 and older and 49% are females who are 18 and older. She surmises that since her videos are typically in English and Russian it makes sense that the countries with the top subscribers were Germany, Russia, Australia and Canada

“I think now that ASMR community is more popular on the YouTube platform more people are reaching out for collaboration. Before that people usually walk by our community and go, ‘That’s the weird side. We’re not even going to acknowledge it — close our eyes and keep walking.’ Now people are embracing it and seeing the potential.”

Reference:

Laura Dang, 2015, Gentle Whispering ASMR: Why Millions of People Watch This Woman Whisper on YouTube, published by NEXTSHARK. https://nextshark.com/maria-gentle-whispering-youtube