Nineteen years of ASMR on YouTube: A multilingual, theme-level analysis of 89,241 videos

Alam, M. S., Bazilinskyy, P.

In preparation.

ABSTRACT Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) videos are commonly framed around whispered speech, gentle sounds, close-up attention, relaxation, sleep, and comfort, yet longitudinal, large-scale descriptions of this labelled YouTube genre are scarce. We analyse 89,241 ASMR YouTube videos uploaded between 1 January 2008 and 31 July 2026, with metadata processed on 1 August 2026, from 18,024 channels across 81 language categories. Using title and description text mining with duration, engagement, growth, theme-label indicators, and exploratory clustering metrics, we provide a multilingual longitudinal map of explicitly labelled ASMR on YouTube. Mean growth was 1,125.41 views/day (SD 11,196.23). Among videos with known duration, those under 10 min grew fastest on average (2,075.55 views/day), videos between 10 and 30 min averaged 585.11 views/day, and videos over 180 min averaged 1,293.15 views/day. The most prevalent themes were sleep-related content (17.62%), whisper-focused content (15.49\%), role-play (14.09\%), mukbang or eating (7.08\%), and visual triggers (6.85\%); driving-related content accounted for 3.67\%. An exploratory k-means solution grouped videos into 11 clusters, and a full-dataset UMAP projection visualised the resulting structure for all 89,241 videos without treating those groups as definitive ASMR subgenres.