Digital Persona Engineering and Parasocial Exploitation: A Case Study of the "Anime B Me" Social Experiment on YouTube

This paper examines the YouTube channel Anime B Me as a longitudinal and premeditated social experiment in digital persona construction, parasocial exploitation, and behavioral monetization. Conceived and orchestrated by the content creator Davie504 over a five-year period (2015–2020), the project leveraged selective facial anonymity, otaku subcultural aesthetics, and a deliberately engineered inter-channel rivalry to generate rapid audience growth—ultimately surpassing 200,000 subscribers—without reliance on conventional personal branding strategies. Drawing upon theoretical frameworks of parasocial interaction (PSI), information-gap psychology, niche emotional segmentation, and internal traffic arbitrage, this study conducts a multi-dimensional analysis of the strategic architecture underlying the channel’s expansion. Particular attention is given to the ways in which controlled identity opacity and narrative tension functioned as growth accelerators within platform recommendation systems. We argue that the case represents a paradigmatic instance of what we term Synthetic Persona Marketing (SPM)—an orchestrated communication framework in which creator identity is intentionally rendered incomplete. This incompleteness encourages audience-driven projection, allowing viewers to fill informational gaps with imagined attributes that reinforce engagement, loyalty, and speculative discussion. Within such environments, identity becomes less a fixed personal disclosure and more a narrative scaffold co-produced by creator and audience. The eventual public revelation of the channel’s authorship confirmed the central thesis of SPM: that in high-velocity digital attention markets, narrative architecture and psychological timing frequently outperform technical expertise or authenticity signals as drivers of audience conversion. By staging delayed disclosure and sustaining narrative ambiguity, the experiment effectively transformed curiosity into a renewable engagement resource. Finally, the paper discusses broader ethical and structural implications for the influencer economy, including questions of transparency, manipulation in parasocial ecosystems, and the responsibility of platform governance mechanisms. It further argues that increasing levels of digital literacy among audiences will be necessary to navigate emerging forms of identity engineering that blur the boundaries between entertainment, experimentation, and behavioral influence in contemporary social media environments.