The rise and rise of Charity Porn
It's not what you think it is.
It's not everyday that you come across academic papers with catchy titles. So when I do come across one, I cherish them like any GenZ does when they see a good meme- take a screenshot and forget about it.
Except this time I decided to actually read the paper. It's titled If you press this, I’ll pay and is written by Vincent Miller and Eddy Hogg. They bring forth an interesting concept to understand a strange phenomenon taking over our internet culture. Called 'audience commodity', it's the idea that media consumption is essentially a form of labor, because people spend time creating a valuable commodity — an audience — that is then sold to advertisers.
Now, I know, what you're thinking. How is watching something labour? There's no official contract here. We do it out of our own volition. That's not work, it's leisure! And yes, all of this is correct. But it might not be the case when you’re watching a charity porn video.
🤔 What is Charity Porn anyway?
It’s a term used to describe internet videos wherein the maker/protagonist of a video randomly finds a person having a hard time and helps them out materially. They will either dole out cash, tip you super-generously, or just pick up your bills. If you’re still confused, just type ‘helping out strangers’ on Youtube and you’ll get the idea. It’s a massive genre.
As evident from the screenshot above, this genre does incredibly well online. People flock to these videos and can’t seem to get enough of it. The views on these videos often correlate with the scale of generosity on offer. In the pic below, you can see how different creators vie with each other, trying different permutation and combinations, in an effort to outdo each other
For a long time though, this was mostly a fragmented phenomenon on the internet. It started off on a relatively small scale with just a bunch of videos going viral, until one man just flipped the whole equation around. Mr Beast aka Jimmy Donaldson. The man is a force of nature on Youtube. He has the third most subscribed to channel on Youtube and holds the record for surpassing 10 million views on every single video he’s posted for more than a year straight.
🤨 Who’s Mr Beast?
Mr Beast has been doing Youtube for more than a decade now. His channel has strayed from doing simple gameplay videos in its initial days, to doing general informative videos, to outlandish stunt videos, before finally landing on the charity porn bandwagon. If you want a hagiographic account of the man, just watch this documentary. It’s an hour long video, so if that’s a turn off, you can read this profile piece on him by Bloomberg.
Mr Beast’s pivot to the charity porn bandwagon has been quite stellar. The scale of his videos are mind-blowing, to say the least. He spends a ludicrous amount of money doing charitable gigs. There’s a special focus on helping out his subscribers, a clever ploy to deepen user engagement and retention amongst his viewers. There’s also an added focus on incentivising new subscribers to the channel. Just look at this official intro video on his channel. It’s quite something.
All of this has been going on for some time now. Mr Beast and his Youtube channel has grown from strength to strength. But suddenly, Mr Beast and his antics became a topic of heated debate. It all started with this one video.
People found it extremely off-putting. His detractors found the video (& the thumbnail) obnoxious. The general sentiment was against this strategy of monetising charity. Mr Beast, on his part, discarded these objections. Mr Beast, and his litany of followers, have always maintained that the underlying sentiment behind his videos has always been to do good and to help people. The commercialisation of his videos, through Youtube & its algorithm, is a necessary step to reach that end goal.
🧐 Why the controversy?
Remember Vince and his paper with a cool title? Yeah, his theory of audience commodification comes really handy to understand the pushback against such videos. You see, Mr Beast’s new age model of philanthropy is based on a collective model- wherein the public contributes by watching the video for free and Mr Beast gets to do charitable deeds. Your views are effectively bankrolling good deeds.
But the problem herein is that these videos are like shortcuts for a larger systemic problem that is not being addressed directly by the man or any of his other philanthropic adventures. In the absence of such context and a long term plan for the self-reliance of people/communities on the receiving end of it, there’s no real or meaningful impact- rendering these videos nothing more than a clickbait or an exercise in building social clout.
Mr Beast’s endeavours have ignited regional copycats as well. Back home in India, Harsha Sai is one such example. He follows the same template as that of Mr Beast and it’s no wonder that the reactions to his videos have been quite similar as well.
People often wonder whether calling out such videos are even that big of a deal. Yes, they’re not addressing systemic problems but they’re doing the best that they can for the people. They are changing lives for better. Isn’t that worth some appreciation? And we have charities for long term affects and they’re not perfect by any stretch. They enforce their viewpoints on the public through their money. It is such a massive problem that there’s even a book on the matter. You can get it from here.
What do you think of this? Meet me in the comment section down below and we can discuss it at length there.
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