Every second Saturday Between midnight and 4:20 am, 26-year-old Mikkel Nielsen is tortured with loud noises, flashing lights and electric shocks. With a camera trained on his cartoon bedding, the Dane tries to sleep as around 1,000 people watch live on Twitch. Typically, around a hundred of these viewers donate money during the stream – the amount donated has an impact on Nielson’s community. For $1, viewers can enter a message that a bot will read to Nielson and wake him up. For $95, they can zap him with a shock bracelet wrapped around his wrist.
Nielsen is an “interactive sleep streamer,” a type of content creator burgeoning on Twitch and TikTok. In 2020, WIRED reported on the rise of sleep streamers — but these early adopters simply filmed themselves sleeping peacefully, a phenomenon that seems oddly antiquated when you’ve seen a man scream and pound his mattress while a high-pitched howl ripples through his loudspeaker sounds. This new cadre of sleep streamers don’t really sleep. They manipulate their spaces so that every online donation corresponds to an action — usually one that’s loud and annoying.
An Australian TikToker named Jakey Boehm is the sleeper of the moment — earning $34,000 from his streams in May alone. Other creators, like YouTube’s “Asian Andy,” a pioneer of the format, brag about how much they make on videos like “HOW I MADE $16,000 WHILE SLEEPING FOR 7 HOURS.” Of course, they have inspired imitators. My TikTok For You page recently provided me with a slew of amateur sleep streamers — from the man with a flour-filled balloon hanging over his head to the woman reportedly being doused with a bucket of water for just under $150. A man is currently asking for 1,000 followers so he can start sleep streaming. (TikTok will not allow users to live stream until they reach this threshold.)
For viewers, being able to rob a streamer of sleep is hilarious, but sleepers are drawn to further extremes to keep audiences entertained. While Boehm initially only offered viewers the opportunity to control his printer, its construction became increasingly complex – donations can now trigger a bubble machine and an inflatable hose man. How does it feel to make money and lose sleep in the process? What’s life really like for successful sleep streamers — and should we worry that they’re inspiring unsuccessful ones?
“Every time I do sleep stream, I laugh myself to death every night from sleep deprivation,” he says Nilsen, which has nearly 1.4 million combined Twitch, TikTok, and YouTube subscribers. Nielsen estimates that he’s only slept for about six minutes straight by a stream — and even then, he’s never managed to fully fall asleep. He finishes his streams at 4:20 a.m., “plays a weed song”, processes his footage until about 5:30 a.m., and then sleeps until noon.
Nielsen uses the Lumia Stream program to connect his smart lights to his social media, and viewers regularly wake him up with a bright burst. The program If This Then That also allows him to connect different devices, so that a donation on Twitch can, for example, zap his electrocution bracelet or broadcast a YouTube video. Once, a neighbor’s friend knocked on Nielsen’s door at 3 a.m. to complain about noise pollution, but afterwards he bought $200 of liquor for each of his neighbors to apologize — he hasn’t received a complaint since.