Somewhere Between S*x Work & Live Shopping; What IS NPC Tiktok?
This new-ish fascination is just rebranding a 30-year old trend, proving that the oldest profession in the world will survive anything.
Tiktok’s NPCs have entered our collective internet consciousness, and over the past five to seven days, they’ve been a major source of discussion. While others find it silly, still more think it’s a quick and easy (ahh, more on that later) way to make a living amidst reports that top NPCs can earn a few thousand dollars weekly.
But why now? Streaming has been a thing for at least two decades; one notorious example is the experience of Japanese comedian Tomoaki Hamatsu, better known as Nasubi (Japanese for eggplant). In the early 2000s, Nasubi unknowingly participated in the “most evil livestream ever” when he agreed to be on Susunu! Denpa Shonen, a reality show that ran from 1998-2002. I won’t give away the whole premise, but for 18 months, over 17 million people watched the struggling comedian scrounge for food and money, sometimes in the nude. In the end, he suffered months of public humiliation in a Truman Show-like reality show for around ~$10,000 ($17,000 in 2023 money).
Nasubi’s experience was a precursor to modern reality TV and a reminder that human beings’ appetite for suffering is nearly insatiable. In the decades since, live streamers, primarily in the APAC (Asia-Pacific) region, have made millions of dollars with just a ring light and a phone.
Cam Models Did it First
Long before Nasubi and light years before Twitch, a few enterprising women tapped into the power of the internet, pioneering pornography in a way that the largely male-led adult entertainment industry couldn’t do—all with just a rudimentary webcam and an ethernet cord.
And one woman, in particular, led the pack. On April 14, 1996, 19-year-old university student Jennifer Kay pointed a webcam into her dorm room and started “Jennicam,” a 24-hour live stream that precedes Tiktok NPCs and Survivor. Kay is, effectively, the mother of both live streamers and reality TV. For seven years, the Pennsylvania (who was raised as a nudist) student broadcasted everything, from the mundane to the sexy, eventually charging users for premium access before going silent in 2003 (apparently, to this day, she does NOT maintain any type of social media presence).
What Kay started, others (primarily women) took further, and the 2010s introduced well-known cam model sites like LiveJasmin.com, Chaturbate, and the big kahuna of adult D2C adult websites: OnlyFans. These sites promise authenticity and a more “home-spun” feel for adults seeking pleasure in the comfort of their own homes. There’s also the interactive aspect; pornographic films are edited and done before they ever reach the consumer, but with live cams, the viewer can pay for what they want to see (within reason, of course). To me, this is probably the most compelling aspect of cam models, the individualized experience.
According to mediavsreality.com, there are two revenue models for cam models:
Customers can pay for a one-on-one show in a private chatroom; cam models often charge a fixed rate—perhaps $2/hr or $100/hr session, with the expectation that the cam model’s attention is focused solely on the customer for the duration of the session
In a more digital strip club-like model, customers purchase gifts and tokens to spend on their favorite model, donating more and more in order to stand out from the crowd
Does the second model sound familiar? That’s because it is essentially what’s happening in the Tiktok NPC lives. While cam models are more likely to engage in explicit work, there’s a niche for everything…look at mukbang videos, which are definitely a more sanitized version of a feederism.
There is also a non-sexual component here.
E-Commerce Live Streaming is a $180B Dollar Industry
Alibaba, a multi-national China-based technology company, is estimated to be worth about $900B. It’s estimated that 80%, or $600B, of that valuation comes from their consumer e-commerce arm, T-Mall, a mostly mobile shopping platform that makes Amazon look like your run-of-the-mill mom-and-pop store. Their live-streaming arm is a massive modern-day home-shopping network with everything from L’Oreal to Diane Von Furstenberg.
At any given time, hundreds of Chinese influencers pull in thousands of dollars by partnering with brands to sell products. It’s a hot market in China, and there are even boot camps and programs where aspiring live-streamers can “train” to become the next live-streaming e-commerce star.
Some of these programs can charge as much as $1,000 for a two-week course, which converts to ¥7,170, a hefty sum for rural Chinese citizens, who earn ~¥17,131 on average. There is also fierce competition and government scrutiny; several popular live streamers have reportedly gone dark after running afoul of the government, such as beauty influencer Viya, whose real name is Huang Wei. The popular live-streamer disappeared in December 2021. It was later revealed she owed over $100M in unpaid taxes. Her platforms have yet to come back.
TikTok is a China-based platform, so it’s no wonder they might try and jumpstart e-commerce live-streaming here in the West; their Chinese sister site, Doyuin, generated $119B in 2021 from live-streaming sales. However, most analysts agree that those numbers aren’t happening anytime soon, at least in the US. Live streaming netted about $20 billion in 2022. Static e-commerce? Over $1 trillion. It seems Americans are not as enamored with the interactive aspect of shopping as our counterparts in the East.
That doesn’t mean TikTok doesn’t see the potential (see: The TikTok Shop).
Where Does “NPC” Come from?
So, sure, cam models and digital home shopping network influences aside, where does the “NPC” fit into all of this?
NPC means “non-playable character,” it’s videogame slang for those animated characters in games that just kind of stand there and add ambiance. Sometimes they help the player advance the gameplay by providing hints, background stories or taking specific actions. They mostly just wait for the actual playable character to interact with them. One defining characteristic of NPCs is that they don’t have autonomy; they just exist in a hellish, never-ending loop of nothingness, as they’re programmed to do.
As the internet evolves, so does the use of the term NPC. In a 2018 New York Times column, Kevin Roose broke down how the far-right Trump supporters had taken a liking to the term as an insult for Liberals because we’re “brainwashed sheep who have been conditioned to parrot left-wing orthodoxy, in the manner of a scripted character.” Ouch. I sometimes wish I was an actual NPC. Imagine living peacefully in your little garden or pasture until a dude who actually has to make decisions needs you. I’m a Libra, in case you’re wondering.
TikTok’s NPCs, by that logic, exist solely to interact at the behest of playable characters, in this case, the paying audience. That’s a kink, BTW, called “Total Power Exchange,” where the dominant person is given total dominion over the submissive person, with consent, of course. It isn’t total total, but the idea here is the same, and its one cam models have practiced for years.
Is it inherently dangerous? No.
Is it sex work? Yes.
Is it something new that a few forward-thinking digital entrepreneurs discovered a few months ago? Not at all.
As with almost everything on the internet, TikTok NPCs are just the latest iteration of a lucrative, time-honored tradition that, in and of itself, is an iteration of the oldest profession in the world—proving, yet again, that sex work is as resilient as cockroaches and Cher.
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