The ‘NPC’ livestream TikTok trend helping creators earn cash

And interest keeps rising, says Marcus Bösch , a TikTok research fellow at HAW Hamburg, who runs the Understanding TikTok newsletter. As part of his research into how these trends evolve, he’s gathering an ongoing – and growing – list of NPC videos. According to proprietary data seen by the BBC, creators using the hashtag #NPC uploaded more than 47,000 videos in July, which have been viewed a collective 835 million times. Sitting in front of a phone and livestreaming yourself repeating the same phrases over and over may seem like a strange way to pass the time, but some NPC creators are seeing revenue from the trend. In July, PinkyDoll told the New York Times that she made between $2,000 and $3,000 (£2,360 to £1,570) per livestream from those in-app gifts that trigger her mechanical responses. That represents a large, highly engaged viewership, not least because individually the gifts are often only worth pennies. For instance, sending an ice cream cone gift to PinkyDoll costs $1.30 (£1.02). Although she’s never studied NPC creators specifically, Maddox says these TikTok creators ‘have told me they make the bulk of their app income through [livestreams]’. Maddox also believes it’ll only be a matter of time before brands jump on the bandwagon and get an NPC creator to produce sponsored content, further enhancing these TikTokers’ earning power. Although it’s spiking now, the NPC trend isn’t guaranteed to stick around – like many things in social media, phenomena can fade as quickly as they gain steam. Yet the experts think the NPC trend could be more than just a flash in the pan. ‘I can definitely see this trend continuing,’ says Maddox. ‘I’ve spent years studying ASMR on YouTube, and the parallels to NPC TikToks are striking.’ Indeed, some ASMR creators are moving away from YouTube as their platform of choice and turning to TikTok to generate quick revenue and build an audience.   Regardless of the staying power of NPC creators such as PinkyDoll, this phenomenon represents a larger trend: creators are finding new ways to make money through social media, and will continue to do so – however unconventional the approach may be.