Yin Rou squeezes bubbles out a slime product to make satisfying sounds.

By Shaw Wan

BEIJING, July 27 (TMTPOST) -- Have you watched dentists cleaning up the dark spots on someone’s teeth before you go to sleep? I have. So do millions of other Chinese. We spend hours watching relaxing videos to stop ourselves from getting anxious or depressed amid uncertainties caused by the COVID-19 pandemic or mass layoffs. And some of us started to rake it in.

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Yin Rou, nicknamed Moon Goddness, earns up to $2,000 a month. She started publishing relaxing videos on Bilibili. “Many of my viewers are schoolgirls. Some sent me messages saying that my videos have accompanied them through some difficult times,” she said.

Yin specializes in playing slime, a moist and soft toy product originally designed for kids. It’s now become a stress toy, as viewers feel satisfied hearing the viscous and crunchy sounds when such toys are kneaded. “The creator has won me over. Her videos are so relaxing and comfortable as I have perfectionism!” one follower of hers said.

Apart from slime toys, content creators also use rainbow tape balls and soaps to soothe viewers and trigger pleasant, tingly sensations. Their key to success lies in stimulating viewers’ autonomous sensory meridian response, also known as ASMR, a physical response that some people have to visual or aural stimuli, like the crunchy sound brought by colorful slime toys.

The anxious Chinese gen Z

The generation Z, the demographic cohort who were born from 1997 to 2012, are experiencing high levels of anxiety and depression in recent years, another reason why content creators are able to gain profits by making relaxing videos. According to a report by

Academic performance, career development, body shaming and health issues are the major triggers for Chinese young people to be anxious, according to a report by Fudan Development Institute. The unemployment rate of people aged between 16 and 24 in June reached a historic high of 19.3 percent, reported Guancha News, a Chinese news outlet. One out of five Chinese young people are jobless, a quite significant source of anxiety.

Instead of joining the rat race, they become couch potatoes. Many trendy words were created to describe such a mindset, including buddha-like (佛系), slacking (丧), lying flat (躺平) and tanking (摆烂).

That’s also how Yin got started. After watching many relaxing videos, she began to buy various slime products for reviews and create her own relaxing videos. Why are her videos able to attract millions of views? She believed that was because slime toys were quite colorful, which were pleasing to the eye. And she was able to play slime in a way that viewers found most comfortable, because she used to be one of them. “I noticed that many content creators are good at playing slime, however, they may use a wrong filter when editing videos,” she added.

Not an easy job

Yin now has nearly 360,000 followers on her Bilibili channel. With that number of followers, she is able to earn $1,000 to $2,000 each month. However, this is not her major source of income. She works as a live streamer on Taobao, China’s largest e-commerce platform. Here’s a typical day for her – five hours promoting products on Taobao and seven hours creating slime videos, including playing slime and editing footages.

For those who want to follow in her footsteps, Yin believed the most important was to be interested in it. “If all you want to do is to make money, you might not be able to create videos that viewers would enjoy watching, because you wouldn’t make efforts to try to understand what they truly need,” she said.

Monetizing relaxing videos is not an easy job. Apart from resilience, content creators are faced with fierce competition. Bear, a content creator who cuts rainbow tape balls, noticed that there’s an increasing number of creators competing for business. “Many online stores have sold over 100,000 sticky ball tapes in the first half of this year, which is way more than that of the last year.”

A content creator is cutting a rainbow tape ball which she spent almost 100 hours making.

Bear earned her first pod of gold last October, the second month when she started cutting tape balls online. She made $700 off of her first video with over one million clicks, while working as a staff member on a

But she doesn’t plan to devote herself into content creation, because it doesn’t promise a stable income. As Bear doesn’t accept sponsorships, how much she can earn depends on the video sharing platform. She can end up with less than $100 if a video attracts less than one million views.

Like any other content creators, those specializing in relaxing videos are also criticized by netizens. They were accused of wasting time or materials. To make a rainbow tape ball, Bear would spend at least a month repeating one thing – growing the size of a sticky ball by applying adhesives from tapes. “What’s the point of cutting balls?” one viewer commented on her channel.