No, I didn’t imagine it – the ‘NPC’ craze really offers money for robotic gibberish | Arwa Mahdawi

People online pretend to be jerky video-game characters - and some make tons of money doing it. What on earth?

Have you ever thought about selling pictures of your feet online? I'm not ashamed to say it's crossed my mind. It's not that I have exceptionally lovely feet - in fact, they're pretty gnarly - it's just that I like scheming up ways to get rich quick. And, for a while, it seemed like feet were just the ticket. There was a period in 2022 when TikTok was inundated with videos about the photo-selling website FeetFinder; footfluencers were claiming to make thousands of dollars on the site. It was intriguing but also a little suspect ... Could you really make a living from your feet? Were there that many foot fetishists out there willing to pay top dollar for a glimpse of a stranger's toe?

Having just emerged from a research rabbit hole I suggest you don't enter, it turns out, yes, there is a surprising number of foot fetishists in the world. But that doesn't mean it's easy to monetize your trotters. It seems a lot of the videos praising FeetFinder on TikTok were actually ads: sponsored content that hadn't been properly labelled as such. There are probably a few people making OK money posting online foot pics, but it's not a speedy route to riches.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist