Gongbang is the name of a growing live-streaming trend in South Korea, where people broadcast themselves studying in almost total silence for hours on end to dozens, sometimes hundreds of viewers who love nothing more than to watch them do it.

Ask most popular streamers and they’ll tell you that the keys to a successful live-streaming career are providing entertaining and exciting content, and viewer engagement. That’s what makes the Gongbang live-streaming trend, which has been growing in the Asian country over the last decade, so fascinating. Gongbang streamers almost never connect with their audience, and as for providing exciting content, the most excitement they offer is turning a page every once in a while. They simply broadcast themselves studying for many hours at a time, and, for some reason, people love watching them do it.

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Making it as a YouTube creator usually involves posting informative or exciting content, but one young YouTuber in South Korea has been proving that doing the exact opposite can have very similar results. He has been posting 7-hour long videos of him just studying in silence and still managed to get hundreds of thousands of subscribers in just a couple of months.

Bot-No-Jam (Korean for “a robot which is no fun”) is not your typical YouTube success story. The mysterious young man has found a niche that most of us would have never believed could be popular – studying. And, no, this is not some cool and exciting way of studying, but plain old sitting behind a desk reading and taking notes, in total silence, for several hours at a time. For some reason, people just love to watch him do it. How else could you explain the fact that Bot-No-Jam’s channel has gotten nearly 330,000 subscribers since April?

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