South Korean woman makes £5,600 a month streaming herself eating

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Park Seo-yeon, 34, makes her living eating in front of a camera
The 'food porn' trend has seen her make thousands from her hobby
Park films her daily meals and broadcasts them live on a streaming site

Published: 04:14 EST, 28 January 2014 | Updated: 04:55 EST, 28 January 2014

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A South Korean woman has turned an unusual online trend into hard cash, making more than £5,600 a month by livestreaming herself having dinner.

Park Seo-yeon, 34, has been able to quit her day job at a consultancy firm and instead focus all her energy on her daily meals on camera.

Tens of thousands watch her every day as she serves up disproportionately large meals in her Seoul flat and eats them, live, on a streaming site where she goes by the name The Diva.

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'Food porn': Park Seo-yeon, 34, from Seoul, films herself eat ginormous meals for up to three hours a day

Park can spend as long as three hours eating in front of the camera, and make an average $£5,660 a month from advertising and ‘donations’.

The donations, in the form of virtual ‘balloons’ – a South Korean version of BitCoins worth 100won each (about 9 U.S. cents) – can be exchanged for cash.

The trend, known as gastronomic voyeurism, has grown in recent months in a country which has one of the highest increase in single households in the world.

One-person households are set to increase from 25.3 per cent of the total in 2012 to 32.7 per cent in 2030, the fastest rate in the countries that make up the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, research papers show.

Online forums such as Reddit discuss the Korean ‘shame’ of eating alone, and the online food shows are a way for people living alone to get a sense of community when eating.

Living hand to mouth: Park has been able to quit her office job and now lives off her eating show from which she makes an average $9,400 a month

Dinner time: Park prepares food for her food-eating show in her apartment in Incheon, west of Seoul

Sharing time: Park shows a spoonful of food to the camera, to get her viewers involved as she eats and chats with them on her streaming site

Perfection: The 34-year-old former consultancy worker has professional cameras and lighting to ensure she can put on a show for her fans

Park, who has been filming her show for three years, said: ‘People enjoy the vicarious pleasure when they can't eat this much or find that food at night or are on a diet.

‘Loneliness is another crucial factor,’ Park said. ‘The show is addictive as you can communicate with thousands of people at home.’

The bizarre craze is called mok-bang, a mash-up of the words 'dinner' and 'broadcast', and it is thought to be more than 3,500 people running 'live eating' shows.

Every night when the 'broadcast jockey' gets home from work, thousands of people log onto live-streaming site Afreeca TV for hours to watch her wolfing down enormous meals.

Her plates of choice range from two medium pizzas to 30 fried eggs and a box of crab legs, or five packets of instant noodles.

Serious business: More than 3,500 people in South Korea run online video blogs, streaming themselves having dinner, but The Diva is one of the most popular

Joining in: Research has found that the number if single households in South Korea is spiking, something which could explain The Diva's popularity

Forever alone: One of the reasons behind the rising number of 'gastronomic voyeurism' streaming is that it leaves people living alone a sense of community

The Diva insisted she did not have an eating disorder, was not regurgitating her meals and had no health problems.

She added she began broadcasting her dinners because she was 'bored and needed a hobby'.

The Diva is just one of a host of people who have started broadcasting themselves eating over-the-top meals.

Another, BJ Lebi, devours plates of food the size of her head while answering questions from her fans, including how much she can eat and how often she uses the toilet, all live on air.

The videos have now swept onto YouTube, where they have several thousands views - more than 200,000 in one case.