I was going to suggest people wouldn't pay other people directly for mukbang but apparently they already do.
My wife and I watched TikTok Boom this weekend after it was shared here. They interview a beatboxer who captured an audience on tiktok rather than the inverse. If he's the hero, his foils are women showing more skin than they'd like or tiktokers exaggerating identity driven oppression for positioning purposes. One woman is a nearly white-passing Afghani who headlines with being bullied as a minority ... and when they cut to her high school graduation, it's much more colorful than most in the united states ... truly urban.1
It's nice to have a name for this phenomena! These kinds of things remind me of one of my favorite classes in college - tech/media/culture studies ... Tech is giving us lived experiments.
My wife was disturbed by advertisers rather than audiences being the financial patrons of tiktok creators ... they capture (or become captured) to resell their audience to brands. This is less of a point and more of just another strange dynamic.

Footnotes

  1. as an older persian guy who went to a mostly white rural high school, this struck me as odd
The only thing that shocks me about this reply is the first half of your first sentence. Well, and your "return from footnote" link, which is amazing :)
I can't think of a conceptual tag that has done more work in my brain than "audience capture". It's like half of modernity snaps into focus.
Combine that with whatever you would call the fracture where we can inhabit separate self-soothing realities by curating our assorted feeds, and you have the last 7 years or so, and probably the next however-many years before humans extinguish themselves.
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