Advertisement In just a few days in April, nearly a million people watched a YouTube video in which a young woman with a pink-lipsticked mouth consumed a series of ice-creams. They couldnât see her eyes, just her mouth as she sucked and slurped her way through each of the crinkly-wrappered confections before her. The star of the show, a 20-something South Korean woman called âJane ASMRâ, has more than 13 million subscribers on YouTube and earns thousands of dollars a day through advertising thanks to one of the internetâs strangest phenomena: people posting videos of themselves whispering, eating noisily or tapping binaural microphones in order to induce a pleasurable physical sensation â an Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (or ASMR) â in the people watching them. Some fans talk of âbrain-gasmsâ, others of an intense feeling of relaxation that sends them off to sleep.