YouTube streamer banks $16k just sleeping and letting viewers wake him up

A YouTube streamer made an absolute killing simply by sleeping on stream and letting viewers donate to wake him up.

Sleep streams have become somewhat of a common occurrence in recent years. While Twitch, YouTube and other platforms are most commonly used to stream gameplay or chat to fans, many have also livestreamed their sleep, with thousands pouring in to simply watch someone in their slumber.

While it sounds weird, there’s obviously something about it that works for people — especially the broadcasters who hit the jackpot and manage to make a pretty penny for it.

That’s exactly what happened for Asian Andy, who banked $16,000 in his sleeping stream.

During his seven hours of sleep — or, a fair bit less considering his viewers were aiming to keep him awake — this averages out to little under $2,300 an hour.

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During the stream, viewers could donate to disturb Andy and keep him awake. This meant text-to-speech-donations, with viewers asking Alexa to play loud music or play an alarm to shock him into staying awake.

They also asked Alexa to reveal his location and frequently attempted to trick him into believing there was someone standing at his bedroom window, at one point even saying that someone was there with a knife.

In perhaps one of the creepiest moments of the stream, someone left a note on his window, which seemed harmless and with purely funny intentions but still definitely raises some questions.

It must be pretty annoying trying to sleep and constantly being woken up, but with over 1 million subscribers on YouTube, Andy can’t have expected much more. That alongside an additional $16k in the bank probably made it all a bit more worthwhile.

This is definitely an anomaly as far as successful sleep streams go, but it shows there really is the possibility to make money from anything — especially on the internet.