Parasocial Relationship in the big ‘26?

Ten years later, we’re still buying attention?

Last Saturday, I fell down a YouTube rabbit hole. A PUBG stream, of all things. The kind of stream that belongs to 2017, back when India’s internet was being rebooted by a ₹299 per month revolution called Jio, and teenagers were discovering that you didn’t need a console, just a cheap phone, unlimited data and the will to watch CarryMinati or Mortal drop into Erangel and carry their squad to a chicken dinner.

I watched for maybe twenty minutes. The game looked the same. The streamer played the same. But what hit me wasn’t the gameplay. It was the chat. A river of superchats, names being read aloud, people spending real money to hear a stranger say “hello” to them on the internet. “Hello from Hyderabad, big fan since 2018.” And the streamer, pausing mid-game, reading the name, grinning. Transaction complete.

I felt something strange watching it. Not quite disgust not quite nostalgia. Something closer to recognition. Haven’t we been here before? Haven’t we, as a generation that grew up online, evolved past this? The answer, it turns out, is a flat no, and the science behind why is far more interesting, and far more troubling, than any of us want to admit.

What Is a Parasocial Relationship?

The term was coined in 1956 by sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, who were watching early television and noticed something strange: audiences were developing what felt like genuine emotional intimacy with TV hosts. Not just fans of a show but intimate with a person. The hosts would address the camera directly, use first names, make inside jokes with “the audience.” Viewers would feel hurt if a host took a day off. They’d write letters. They’d grieve.

Horton and Wohl called these “parasocial interactions”, the simulation of face-to-face intimacy with a media figure. The viewer feels like a participant in a relationship. The media figure doesn’t know they exist.

For a long time, this was considered a niche phenomenon, mostly studied in the context of soap operas and news anchors. Then the internet happened.

India, Jio, and the Night We All Went Live

To understand why parasocial relationships feel so native to our generation in India, you have to go back to September 2016. Reliance Jio entered the telecom market and handed a country of 1.4 billion people free 4G data. Within eighteen months, India went from having some of the most expensive mobile data in the world to the cheapest. Average data costs fell by over 90%.

YouTube, which had been a premium luxury for broadband households, suddenly opened up to everyone in small towns, tier-3 cities, people who’d never owned a computer. And what they found there was: livestreams. CarryMinati. Mortal. Dynamo Gaming. Young men playing PUBG Mobile in real time, talking to the chat, reacting, laughing, dying, carrying squads.

The superchat was the natural product of this moment. YouTube had launched its tipping feature in 2017 and Indian streamers adopted it immediately. For ₹50 or ₹200, your name would appear in the chat highlighted in colour and the streamer would read it aloud. You’d exist briefly, publicly in someone else’s world.

This wasn’t fan behaviour in the traditional sense. Nobody was paying to support a creative project they believed in. They were paying for a moment of recognition. The streamer knowing your name. The illusion that the connection was, just for a second, mutual.

CarryMinati’s gaming channel, CarryisLive, launched in 2017 and exploded almost immediately. Today, across his combined channels, he sits at over 60 million subscribers and 7 billion total views. Mortal built Team SoloMid’s Indian presence from the ground up. These weren’t just entertainers they became daily presences in the lives of hundreds of thousands of viewers, showing up every evening, knowing the community’s inside jokes, building a world.

That’s not fandom. That’s a relationship, however lopsided.

Source: Youtube Livestream, Channel: CarryisLive

So Why Do We Still Pay?

Here is where it gets genuinely interesting and where the research has been piling up at a remarkable rate in the last two years.

A 2024 study found that people perceive parasocial relationships to be genuinely effective at fulfilling emotional needs not as a poor substitute for real relationships, but as a legitimate mechanism for emotional regulation. Feeling stressed? Watching your parasocial-bonded creator calms you down. Feeling lonely? Fifteen minutes of a familiar voice in the chat makes the loneliness subside.

The dark, almost beautiful irony is this: social media creates the loneliness. And then social media sells you the cure. Research from 2024 published in Online Media and Global Communication found that interaction with social media influencers is positively associated with loneliness, meaning the more you consume, the lonelier you tend to feel. But by the time you register that, you’re already attached.

As for the superchats specifically, a 2025 study in Frontiers in Communication laid it out cleanly: donations to streamers are driven not by transactional necessity but by affective, social and symbolic motivations. Viewers donate to gain visibility in the community, to express admiration and to reinforce emotional bonds formed through parasocial relationships. You’re not buying a product. You’re buying proximity. You’re purchasing the sensation that someone enormous has noticed someone small, you.

Haven’t We Evolved Past This?

This is the question that nagged at me watching that Saturday stream. We are, supposedly, a smarter, more media-literate generation than the one that first watched TV hosts like old friends. We’ve read the think-pieces. We know what parasocial means. We’ve called it out in others. And yet.

The research suggests that media literacy doesn’t actually immunise you. In a meta-analysis of 117 studies covering 47,647 respondents, published in the International Journal of Information Management in 2025, researchers found that parasocial engagement across cognitive, affective and behavioural dimensions tracks consistently with influencer characteristics like trustworthiness and social attractiveness, regardless of the audience’s sophistication.

Knowing what a parasocial relationship is doesn’t make you immune to having one. If anything, the internet has gotten better at engineering them.

The New Generation: Idol Culture and the $4.5 Billion Emotion Machine

If the YouTube superchat era was parasocial relationships in the wild, organic, messy, emergent, what the K-pop industry built is something altogether more deliberate. It is parasocial infrastructure, engineered at the level of business model.

There are currently 200 million active K-pop fans globally as of 2024. BTS’s ARMY fandom alone surpassed 50 million members by end of 2023. Global K-pop fans spend an average of $200 per fan annually on merchandise, in surveys conducted across 26 countries. BLACKPINK’s Born Pink World Tour grossed $148.4 million from 18 shows. BTS alone reportedly accounted for nearly $5 billion of South Korea’s GDP in a single year, placing them in the same economic league as Samsung and Hyundai.

But that’s the old economy. The new one is stranger

Here’s what Bubble actually is: for $3.99 a month per idol, fans receive text messages that look like personal one-on-one chats from their chosen K-pop artist. The interface is deliberately modelled on KakaoTalk: Korea’s dominant personal messaging app. It feels like getting a text from a friend. The idol is, of course, broadcasting this simultaneously to thousands of subscribers. But the feeling is intimacy.

Source: Apple Store

Academic researchers from the University of British Columbia have explicitly described this as the deliberate engineering of pseudo-intimacy. The Seoulz K-Pop Platform report from 2026 noted something even more striking: Bubble has what users call an “anniversary counter” it tracks how many consecutive days a fan has subscribed to an artist. If you cancel, the streak resets to zero. Fans often refuse to unsubscribe even during artist hiatuses, simply to protect the number. The mechanism converts emotional loyalty into predictable, recurring monthly revenue.

A 2025 study published in *Popular Music and Society* used labour process theory to call this out directly, describing the platform as commodifying what they term “relational labour”, the emotional work idols perform to maintain fan attachment. NCT 127’s Jaehyun has mentioned publicly on Bubble that he is contractually expected to send a minimum of four messages per month. The intimacy is scheduled. The closeness is a deliverable.

The psychological hooks run deep. A 2024 study examining K-pop parasocial bonds found that fans constantly interact with their idols through social media, develop high self-disclosure as fans, and critically develop a high sense of dependency. The daily content upload from an idol, using language that mimics interpersonal communication, creates a simulated closeness that the fan’s brain processes as real intimacy. Algorithms then reinforce this: research from an ICFTBA 2025 Symposium paper found that algorithmic recommendation technology crafts idol personas as “virtual intimate companions,” satisfying fans’ intrinsic need for connection.

And Then There Are the Instagram Subscriptions

Here I want to pause and draw a distinction, because it matters.

There are creators on Instagram who charge subscription fees to access their tutorials, their design process, their research breakdowns. That is a product. You’re paying for expertise, for material, for something that transfers value to you. That is legitimate commerce.

What I’m talking about is different. There is an entire class of influencers with followings in the hundreds of thousands who have activated Instagram’s paid subscription feature not to give fans access to skill or craft or information but to give them access to more of their life. More stories. More morning routines. More behind-the-scenes of a life that looks aspirational. More closeness.

The thing being sold, in these cases, is proximity. It is the illusion that you are part of someone’s inner circle. That you know the real them, not the public them. That the relationship is reciprocal in some meaningful sense.

Research describes this precisely: social media influencers foster a sense of intimacy with followers by mimicking real-life relationships, creating emotional connections akin to “secondary attachment objects”, a term from attachment theory. The platform is designed to intensify this. The interface creates what researchers call “online stickiness”: a follower’s willingness to stay connected to an influencer by regularly visiting and checking their accounts. Sticky followers, the study noted, prolong their following length over time and are more likely to convert into paying subscribers.

You’re not subscribing to a person. You’re subscribing to a feed designed, at the level of interface architecture, to make you feel like you know them.

Where in the World Is It Worst?

Parasocial behaviour is universal, but its intensity maps interestingly onto geography and culture.

Southeast Asia and South Asia are high-intensity zones. Research on Filipino Gen Z consumers found that nano-influencers are perceived as “people like them,” producing stronger parasocial bonds and higher purchasing intent than macro-influencers. India, with 462 million social media users as of January 2024, is a particularly fertile environment: high smartphone penetration, low data costs, a young population and a cultural tradition of celebrity devotion (Hindi film stars have had parasocial fan bases for decades, the internet just turbocharged and monetised this).

East Asia is where the infrastructure is most developed. Japan’s idol culture predates the internet, fans of pop groups like AKB48 have long paid for “handshake events” where you can meet an idol briefly and Korea took this architecture and scaled it globally through digital platforms. The Hallyu wave didn’t just export music; it exported a model of engineered fan intimacy.

It’s Getting Stranger. And More Dangerous.

Here is where the trajectory turns.

Everything described above involves parasocial relationships with real human beings. The influencer exists. The streamer exists. The idol, however managed and packaged, is a person. There is at least a theoretical ceiling on the manipulation, the human being behind the account has their own needs, their own limits, their own off days.

That ceiling is now being removed.

The rise of virtual idols AI-powered characters that perform, post and interact is creating a new category of parasocial attachment. Virtual influencer Lil Miquela has 2.4 million Instagram followers as of July 2025. She does not exist. Research shows that while parasocial relationships with virtual influencers are often initially weaker than with human ones, the gap closes as the AI improves and users spend more time with the character.

In China, the virtual idol sector has already matured significantly. A 2025 study examining the Chinese virtual idol group A-SOUL found that parasocial relationships with AI characters drive community participation and sustained fan investment in ways that closely mirror real idol fandom. The researchers noted that algorithms play a significant mediating role: they craft an “idealised image of the idol in a virtual space,” which may differ substantially from any real person but which the fan’s attachment system processes the same way.

We are building systems designed to be emotionally addictive and then removing the human constraint on how optimised they can be.

So What Does This Actually Mean?

I want to be careful not to write this as a screed against the people sending superchats. I’ve felt it too, the warmth of a familiar voice, the comfort of a routine, the strange grief when a creator you watched for years goes quiet. These feelings are real. The brain doesn’t manufacture them from nowhere. They serve functions.

Parasocial relationships do genuinely help people fulfil emotional needs. People experiencing isolation, depression, social anxiety they find real comfort in these connections. For some, a K-pop idol has been, sincerely, a reason to get through a hard year. You can’t dismiss that.

What you can notice is who profits from the gap between what these relationships give you and what they cannot. The streamer is not your friend. The idol’s Bubble message was contractually scheduled. The Instagram subscription is not giving you access to a real inner circle. The algorithm that keeps showing you their content is not looking out for your wellbeing.

The money being spent: the superchats, the Bubble subscriptions, the merchandise is the price of a feeling. The feeling is understandable. The price is real. And the infrastructure extracting that price has, in 2026, become extraordinarily sophisticated at making you feel like you’re getting more than you are.

Here is what I found myself thinking about after that Saturday stream. The person who sent the ₹200 superchat, “hello from Hyderabad, big fan since 2018”, has been a fan for eight years. Eight years of showing up. The streamer heard the name for three seconds and moved on. The viewer watched it happen and felt, briefly, seen.

That gap between how real it feels and how mutual it isn’t is one of the defining emotional architectures of our generation’s internet. We didn’t invent it. But we’ve had it monetised back at us in ways Horton and Wohl, sitting in 1956 watching a television host, could not have imagined.

We haven’t evolved past it. We’ve just gotten better at paying for it.

PS: Writing this made me realise the 2016 Shah Rukh Khan film Fan was essentially a parasocial relationship study disguised as a Bollywood thriller. The film may have been an exaggeration, but given the trajectory: AI companions, engineered intimacy, streak counters counting every day you stayed subscribed, the line between fiction and incident report is getting thinner.