Jess Jiang
speaker
70 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Jess Jiang’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And this is where the story of Peanut the squirrel meets the modern attention economy and the central question it raises. When you have the world's attention, how do you actually turn that into money?
For a long time, attention, this scarce resource, was monopolized by newspapers and TV or radio companies who used the power of celebrity or news or scandal to draw in as many eyeballs as possible in order to sell ads.
Which is exactly what happened when Peanut's first viral video popped off. After that, a popular animal video website called The Dodo posted a video featuring Mark and Peanut.
Mark says Peanut warmed to this newfound limelight right away. He was just a preternaturally charismatic mini fauna, especially when the cameras were rolling.
Wow.
Now, when it came to monetizing all this newfound attention, Mark says he never set out to make money off his tiny, furry best friend. But as Peanut's profile grew in the attention economy of social media, all sorts of strange new opportunities started to present themselves.
Sorry, what is nuts.com?
Now, Mark says there's just a natural limit to the kind of brand opportunities that'll flow to a squirrel. Peanut wasn't exactly Kim Kardashian.
And then one day, Mark says, someone from the website Cameo reached out to get Peanut on the platform. And this is the second big moment where Peanut's story intersects with the modern attention economy and how it's changed over the past decade.
Like you could get your favorite side character from Seinfeld to wish your aunt Vovi a happy birthday.
Cameo was an innovation on the attention economy model because before, while creators had been able to make money through brand deals, it was the platforms like Instagram and YouTube that were making the lion's share of the profits from all this attention by using user data to sell targeted ads. Cameo offered a way for niche celebrities to sell themselves directly to individual consumers.
Early on, Cameo suggested people set their prices by calculating how much they are usually paid per minute based on their salary. Like, if you are an NBA star making $25 million a year, you should be making about $200 a minute, which could help you set your rate for a 30-second birthday video.
Mark would dress Peanut up in costume and have him hold a little post-it note with whatever message had been ordered. They did birthdays, Valentines, even a proposal. With Cameo, they had taken their second step down the squirrel hole of the attention economy.
And it was actually Mark who would become the star of this next chapter. He says it wasn't too long before he started to notice that a lot of the attention they were getting was directed toward him. Mark is a buff guy, works out a lot, and he explains he'd often wear these tight-fitting gym pants in Peanut's videos.
OnlyFans for the uninitiated is a video streaming platform where content creators make customized content for paying subscribers. Mostly it's homemade adult content. It's kind of like the Etsy of porn.
OnlyFans customers can subscribe to a performer's channel for a flat fee and then pay for premium perks like private video conversations with their favorite performer or access to increasingly intimate photos and videos.
Successful OnlyFans performers can make six or even seven-figure salaries, more than Mark was making as a building site inspector. The manager told Mark if he could convert enough peanut fans from Instagram into paying customers on OnlyFans, they could make a killing.
Apparently, when you are building a social media empire consisting of both wholesome animal content and bespoke homemade pornography, just like the Ghostbusters warned, it is essential that you never cross the streams. When did you get a sense that OnlyFans might actually be a much more lucrative platform? way of harnessing the attention of the internet?
Pretty soon, Mark says, he and his wife were bringing in over $10,000 a month through their OnlyFans page, thanks to this enthusiastic group of Peanuts followers. It was enough money that they started to think about how they might build something bigger and longer-lasting out of these eclectic streams of attention.
And that is when they went in on the idea of creating an animal sanctuary. Peanut had been a rescue animal. Mark was like, what better way could there be to turn Peanut's brand into a lasting legacy and source of income?
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