Maeurn Smiles once spent up to 12 hours a day teaching English online and still couldn’t cover her bills.
Now she makes more in a month than she used to earn in a year, and most of it comes down to remembering men’s names.
The 25-year-old left school at 17 because her family couldn’t afford to keep her there.
She moved into online tutoring, mostly Chinese students, and worked 10 to 12-hour days for years.
She liked the job. The money was the problem.
“I loved teaching but the money wasn’t great,” she said.
The job nobody warned her about
These days Maeurn, who has more than 3.4 million Instagram followers at @maeurn.tv, does something her old students would recognise.
She talks to people.
A lot of them. She answers subscribers, asks how their day went, tells them about hers, and keeps track of what they said last time.
Fans pay for what she calls the “girlfriend experience”.
Most people assume that means photos.
It doesn’t.
“My subscribers tell me they love having that girlfriend experience,” she said.
“I talk to them every day. People think it’s just about photos, but a lot of it is actually communication.”
When subscribers fall in love
Some of them mean it. Maeurn says a number of her fans have grown genuinely attached, and a few have said so to her face.
“Some people definitely fall in love,” she said.
“I’ve had subscribers tell me they love me. I think it’s because they feel understood.”
She thinks most of the men paying her aren’t really after content. They want company.
“I think people connect with me because I genuinely care about them,” she said.
“I don’t just talk to them because it’s work. I enjoy getting to know people and hearing about their lives.”
It is, by her account, harder than it looks.
“People think content creation is easy,” she said.
“But you’re talking to people every day. You’re building relationships and making people feel valued.”
A four-bedroom thank you
The money has changed more than her schedule.
Maeurn now supports her family, has put cash into property, and built her parents a four-bedroom house.
“I feel very grateful,” she said.
“I never imagined I would be where I am today.”
Why It Matters
This is the part of the creator economy that gets the least attention.
The chat. Headlines and platforms fixate on images, but the recurring money increasingly comes from the relationship, from subscribers who stay because someone remembers their name and asks how the interview went.
The product isn’t a photo. It’s the feeling of being known.
That shift is showing up across subscription platforms, where creators are leaning hard into one-to-one messaging and the emotional labour that comes with it, because attention is cheap and loyalty isn’t.
Whether the men logging in each day understand they’re one of thousands is a separate question.
Maeurn says she cares about them. Plenty of them clearly believe her.
READ MORE: I gave up finance after a stranger blew £20,000 in front of me – now lonely men ring me just to TALK
