meridian: A New ASMR Platform

This is the road so far

I despise ads. I always have.

I grew up with the internet in the late 90s and so I developed a “special pair of goggles” for browsing the net. Like most people my age, I quickly developed banner blindness but even then, I felt as though I was being constantly bombarded with ads.

Every now and then, an ad will succeed in pitching a product at me. The ad will make me laugh or it’ll make a convincing enough argument that it’ll stick in my head and maybe I’ll buy that thing.

But for every good ad that delivers it’s message with a surgical precision I can appreciate — if not enjoy — there are a hundred ads that try to bash me over the head with their message. These ads must work though, right?

I’ve be listening to ASMR since 2016. If you haven’t heard of autonomous sensory meridian response before, it’s a vaguely medical term that describes a number of phenomenon such as when you get pleasurable “tingles” when you’re getting your hair cut.

ASMR is a form of content that attempts to induce these sensations for its audience. The reasons for this are numerous, but users report benefits to sleep quality, reductions in anxiety, reductions in stress and much more.

According to Deezer, 62% of people have engaged with ASMR content and 75% of people experience some kind of physiological response to it.

But also, ASMR content on YouTube is receiving billions of views a month. That billions with a b.

The problem for listeners

You’re laying in bed. A soothing voice asks you questions about nothing in particular as you wander through the woods, listening to the sound of a nearby river or the wind in the trees. Relaxing right?

Well sorta. If you’re listening to ASMR on YouTube — the main place to consume it — at the start of every new video (and sometimes more often than that) you’ll be pummelled by an ad. An ad that’s louder than the surrounding content. An ad that doesn’t care if you’re trying to fall asleep. An ad that just wants you to know that their version of shoes are the best version of shoes.

But, there are assorted solutions to this problem.

YouTube has a premium plan priced at more than Netflix, Disney Plus and Amazon Prime — who we know wouldn’t try to sneak ads into content you’re already paying for, right?

Spotify has a decent selection of ad-free ASMR if you’re a premium member that doesn’t mind not having the video.

Patreon, OnlyFans and many other platforms offer ASMR too, but not only ASMR and you have to know where to find it.

The problem for creators

ASMR creators on YouTube have already been more than fair with their viewers when it comes to ads, too.

The general consensus in the community it that you don’t run mid and post-roll ads on your ASMR content — that is, ads that run during and after your content. You just run them before your content. This means creators are majorly cutting the amount they can earn from ads.

And that’s not the end of it. It seems, albeit anecdotally, that ASMR creators are already earning $3 per 1,000 views on their content, less than the $5 that many YouTube creators are earning. Maybe it’s because their viewers are not as engaged as the average YouTuber because they’re half asleep?

Ads and ASMR are incompatible

Last year, I was laying in bed listening to ASMR. I was particularly stressed and finding it hard to fall asleep. I had just started to drop off to sleep when a loud ad brought me suddenly and violently back to reality.

I realised then — though I’m certain I wasn’t the first to realise it — that ASMR was waiting for a way to legitimately serve it’s content without ads.

I began sketching out what such a place might look like.

The idea was simple.

The first (bad) idea

Instead of fronting the content with ads, we’ll ask users to pay a small monthly amount! No ads. No fuss.

If you’re shaking your head at me, then don’t worry, I figured out almost immediately that that wouldn’t work, too. There were numerous issues.

• Whilst many users are prepared to pay for ASMR, I wasn’t sure enough of them would.

• I’d have to move the whole back catalog of ASMR from YouTube to a new platform - something even engineers at YouTube might struggle with.

• If new content was available on YouTube, but hadn’t arrived on meridian yet, users would just go to YouTube.

• There’s a general resistance to paying for something that is available for free elsewhere, even if it is ad-free.

• If a creator didn’t agree to let me use their content, I couldn’t use it. People want all of their ASMR creators and I wasn’t going to just steal content.

More recently, I began to share these reservations with friends and family. The more I talked about meridian, the more I realised it probably wasn’t going to work. I’d built a test version and I was probably never going to launch it. If I couldn’t make both users and creators happy, I didn’t want to go ahead with the venture.

The (not so bad?) idea

The more I talked about meridian though, the more I realised that I wasn’t just doing this to get rid of ads. Ads suck, but we could do more.

There’s lots to learn about ASMR from a scientific perspective. How might we help people with it? Could we improve responses?

What might we see if creators could focus less on appeasing algorithmic overlords and more on producing experimental content that they were really interested in?

What if we didn’t compress the audio and enabled creators to produce high-quality, truly binaural and immersive sounds?

I love ASMR, and I want others to love it too. So what could I could to improve the viewing experience?

Here’re a few features I’m now working on right now. They’re not ready to test yet, so if you go looking for them at the link above, you probably won’t find them, but…

• Interactive story-telling — Role-playing is really big within ASMR. What if we enabled creators to set up decisions within their content? An ASMR spa could ask the viewer if they’d like a little trim or full haircut. Maybe after that, they can ask if they’d like their hair washed and dried. Based on the user’s responses, we could offer a bespoke experience.

• Game elements - What if by interacting with the story, you could pick up an item that would enable choices later on? Or complete quests set out in previous videos? With a custom video player, we could add a lot of functionality that improves immersion.

• Optional background music — Sometimes there’re multiple versions of a video, one with music, one without. I’ve added a toggle so that users can just switch the music on and off as they like.

• Search by trigger — Okay, so I know I specifically want to listen to that spray bottle that hairdressers use. How do I find the videos I want? I’ve added a trigger-based search.

• Looping content — What if I want to listen to the same 14 minute section on repeat as I fall asleep because it’s working for me? I’ve added looping controls to the video player.

I’ve already begun working on these features and I think they’ll be ready to test in the coming weeks. I’m excited to share them with you.

How can you help?

Well, how eager are you? If you’re interested in following along with this journey, subscribe to me here on SubStack. I’ll be adding new posts as I go along.

If you’re interested in being a product tester, fill out this short form.

In the mean time, I’ll keep tapping away and will update you all as I make progress.

~ Sam