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View all search resultsIndonesian YouTubers make it big by doing nothing
YouTubers doing passive activities such as sitting for hours and staring into space are somehow getting millions of views. We explore the phenomenon.
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Our ancestors would be in total shock if they found out our generation can actually make a living by doing nothing. Literally.
Maduranese YouTuber Muhammad Didit garnered more than 4 million views just by staring blankly in front of his low-resolution webcam for two hours straight. In these times, when people are the most attentive to what’s happening on the internet, nonsensical content often grabs the spotlight. That video, for example, instantly made the 22-year old a phenomenon, resulting in his subscribers number rocketing from 2,000 to 20,000 (now, he has almost 60,000). People started posting his face as a meme (a joke image), and international publications like VICE and World of Buzz even wrote about him. He's since made similar videos including of himself sitting up on a tree branch and sitting on the toilet for two hours. Didit, who lives and streams his videos from his home in Bangkalan, Madura, even has his own Wikipedia page (not published by him, he swears).
Didit is not the first Indonesian to do this. Alfakhry, a youtuber from Jakarta known as NapLive, has done it a few months prior. Al live-streamed himself sitting still for three hours nonstop. As per today, the video has been watched 650,000 times. Not as successful as his successor, but the number shows that an audience for such passive entertainment exists.
“My videos are always kind of whimsical. To decide what to do, I brainstorm a lot with myself to find an odd, more nonsensical approach. One day, I thought it would be exciting to sit still in a livestream for a few hours,” Al told The Jakarta Post.
He admitted that he had watched Benjamin Bennett, a popular American YouTuber who regularly uploaded this type of content six years ago; he may have even pioneered the genre. However, Al stated he did not think about Bennett when he executed the idea.
“I, too, have no idea why people like to watch me do nothing for several hours. Maybe they were there for proof that I was really going to spend all those hours doing what I said in the title,” he tried to explain.
Immediate success through nonsense
