There's an (in)famous Japanese game show where they put a naked guy in an empty apartment for a year and made him survive off what he could win from sweepstakes in magazines.
The entire thing was livestreamed 24/7, including having an editor digitally add an eggplant emoji over his privates. It was such a hit that they made him do it again, but in Korea, a language he didn't speak.
The history of this show is insane. If I remember correctly the show regularly had 10 million viewers. That is a truly absurd number at the time and even now.
You can find the show online. It's an incredible watch and so so sad.
That's such a fascinating story. In the US you couldn't do that because people would sue. In Japan, they took it as something of value. I mean positive thinking even in the event of a "master-slave relationship."
>>Nasubi reports that he is grateful for his experience and that the producer apologized to him. The producer, Toshio Tsuchiya, says he has no regrets and confirms that he did apologize, and states that his goal is to produce miracles on film, and with Nasubi, that is what happened.
Reading the wikipedia entry it sounded borderline illegal and cruel, then watching a bit on youtube and it feels completely staged to the point of being mainly about paid product placements with some jokes thrown in.
Get the vibe this stuff is in the perennial "Weird Japan" myth category.
The video above is the TV highlights reel with over-the-top (but normal for Japanese TV) captions, sound effects, etc. As far as I can tell, no product/brand names are mentioned or shown, everything is describe in generic terms like "an expensive set of cosmetics" or "a facial mask".
It was livestreamed to the public 24/7. I'm sure the producers tinkered around the edges re: prizes and such (it would be bad PR to have the guy actually die of starvation), but the basic concept of a guy in a box for a year is not really possible to fake.
According to what I've read it was not livestreamed to an audience, with the exception of some brief experiment with 24/7 internet livestreaming. So pretty easy to fake.
I think the "gathering supplies via sweepstakes" is what they're questioning.
I was dubious about that part at first, and then they said he did it in Korea in a language he didn't speak, and now I'm pretty sure it had a lot of tomfoolery to make it work.
It's still interesting, and I'd watch it... But I don't believe it was fully legit.
While in college, a friend used my home address in Vermont during summer break as the return address for these no purchase sweepstakes entries. Vermont was one of the few (maybe only) states where it was illegal to require return postage so his postage costs were half of what they would have been somewhere else.
I opened all the envelopes from McDonald's and brought the scratch offs back to him when school started in the fall. He got a few thousand dollars worth of stuff and I got a really nice new stereo out of it just for opening some envelopes.
As the article notes, for some people this is sort of a variation of gig work and appeals to a lot of the same people: Homemakers, disabled people, etc. People who need more resources and can't really make a full-time job work for them for some reason.
Increasingly, that includes the fact that full-time jobs are in short supply. Gig work is becoming more common because employers don't want to pay benefits.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing per se but in the US we tend to tie essentials like health care to your job and that ends up being a thorny issue for many people.
My sister was disabled with cerebral palsy and lived on a meager SSI allowance in the US. She spent a good portion of her time doing surveys, entering sweepstakes, and whatever offers she could find on the internet. It was a great way to supplement her fixed income.
Yes. In that case, one of the benefits is likely to be that this is a legal means to supplement her income whereas actually "working" for pay may jeopardize your disability income.
Being disabled sucks for so many reasons and rules that actively make it unnecessarily hard to make your life suck less is one of the suckiest things about it.
There was a TV show in Japan where a man had to stay in a room until he managed to win $10000 of value in sweepstakes. I wouldn't say you can make a full-time job out of trying to win sweepstakes, since he ended up staying in the room for about a year.
If a naked man locked in a tiny apartment can make 10k/yr doing what is essentially admin work, then it's completely plausible that a disciplined and skilled engineer with web scrapers, computer vision, custom Python scripts and pants could make 100k+ working part time.
Don’t be so certain. These sweepers are usually entering every possible sweepstakes they can. While you might be able to automate the entries and do it in 10 minutes instead of 3 hours a day, unless you start doing fraud like multiple identities, there may simply be no more sweepstakes to enter.
If you could automatically enroll yourself in every sweepstakes legal for your locale, then you could also offer that service to anyone else interested. People could pay you 5 dollars a month to get automatically entered into every sweepstakes.
Of course, this scales badly. The more people who take your service the less valuable it will be as the odds of winning will decrease. Perhaps the natural balancing point would be somewhere where you could still profit. Might be best to charge nothing but take a cut of the winnings. That way people wouldn't be discouraged from joining by the diminishing likelihood of winning, and the chances that someone from your pool would win would only increase over time.
Like with plenty of such ideas, the answer is to do it anyway - scale it until it breaks, making sure you're always making profit yourself, and then call it a day. Enjoy your money and do something else. A while later people will forget, and someone else will do the same thing.
(The real answer is, of course, to not do this at all, because it's unethical. But that consideration doesn't stop everyone, unfortunately.)
> He started with nothing (including no clothes), was cut off from outside communication and broadcasting, and had nothing to keep him company except the magazines he combed through for sweepstakes entry forms. After spending 335 days to reach his target, he set the Guinness world record for the "longest time survived on competition winnings".
Wow, that sounds extreme.
But then again I remember there was a contest in San Diego where the participants had to stay 15 hours a day on a roller-coaster and many suffered lasting bodily injuries.
I was surprised when one day my stepdad had a fancy gaming mouse. I asked him how he got it and he shrugged and said “I entered a contest and won”. I’m so cynical I didn’t really believe anyone won stuff out of contests, but I guess you’ve got to enter in the first place to win.
Yeah one day my dad dropped his business card in a bowl at the local Yamaha dealer and won a brand new GSXR 750. He rode that ninja bike to work daily for at least 10 years.
It is similar with extreme couponing. I worked at a pharmacy chain in the US, and had a few regular customers that did such a thing. Absolutely amazing what folks can get for little money, though sometimes they had to invest start-up money to get going. After a while, it snowballs and you are paying $10 for $175 worth of stuff.
But the time invested is not small. One of the regular customers did the stuff until she had a child: A baby takes up a lot of the time and mental energy that she previously used for coupons. I think she had months of supplies stocked up before giving birth, though.
I have a good friend who does extreme couponing to supplement her income. I have actually even seen her get paid to buy things due to retailer miscalculations.
Her garage is stocked with such things as laundry detergent, deodorant, various cleaners etc which she sells on Facebook and Craigslist. It does involve a decent amount of time, but she has it organized with folders and does the couponing purchases while shopping normally.
If they’re going to go through all the trouble of submitting so many entries they should use a unique email for each contest and collect data about which companies sold their email addresses to which companies and post it to GitHub.
I think I inadvertently just discovered I missed my calling!
I've won drawings for dozens of random things since I was 5, not because I sought them out, but because a disproportionate number of the times I've thrown my name in a hat just for fun, my name's been picked!
The first thing I ever won was a Frisbee at the California state fair after a pig race, but by the time I finished school, it included a TV, coveted tickets to my school's away game at our rivals, and even my undergrad and grad school tuition!
I've always figured, in a random universe, there are bound to be outliers who win things a disproportionate amount of the time, and I just happened to be one of them, but now I'm curious what would happen if I put that luck to the test!
On the other hand, I've had the same mindset my entire life ("thrown my name in a hat just for fun" when possible) but never ever won anything in 30+ years. But when it comes to the rest of my life, I've been very lucky when it comes to everything from work, personal life, relationships, health and more.
Do try it out and see if your luck replicates to other things, worst case scenario you tried and got experience :)
Being good at it seems largely to be a numbers game and having the time to do it, better would be finding a loophole that allowed you to game a contest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasubi
The entire thing was livestreamed 24/7, including having an editor digitally add an eggplant emoji over his privates. It was such a hit that they made him do it again, but in Korea, a language he didn't speak.