The videos have since racked up over two million views
A maths tutor who started posting his lessons on Pornhub said he did so out of desperation after his after-school club almost went out of business.
Shun-Wei Chang, 34, who also goes by the stage name Changhsu, has managed to rack up 7,000 subscribers on an account that contains hundreds of videos of him explaining calculus.
The Taiwanese tutor's page is fronted by a cheeky “Play Hard Study Hard!” slogan and features him by a chalkboard talking through formulas and equations.
His videos have been watched by more than 2 million people all told, making him a successful fully-clothed content creator in a space dominated by nudity.
Chang often includes porn-related keywords such as “naked,” “giant breasts,” “masturbation,” “threesome,” and “oral sex” in his titles, a calculated move to make sure his videos would appear in as many keyword searches as possible.
Speaking to Vice, Chang said: "A lot of people only see my marketing strategy and think it's interesting," but as it turns out, driving the absurd antics was sheer desperation, as he grappled with a personal crisis.
Tuition centers (also known as cram schools) are lucrative businesses in Asia, where cut-throat competition in education systems force students to seek additional academic help from after-school tutoring.
Before last year, Chang was running his own tutoring center in Hsinchu, a city in northern Taiwan, along with a few co-workers he had hired. But Chang was caught off-guard in February 2020, when one of his co-workers opened a new cram school right above his.
“They took all my students upstairs, so my cram school suddenly lost all its income and could no longer operate,” he said.
Chang was suddenly left with the messy remains of his defunct teaching space and over NT$1 million ($35,900) in debt, including money he had borrowed from the bank to set up his school.
“The problem got so serious that at one point, I contemplated suicide,” Chang said. “I was simply in too much debt, and I wasn't confident that I could repay it quickly.”
Chang turned to online teaching to turn things around and got his website off the ground using several gimmicks, such as live streaming himself solving 100 calculus problems in 10 hours, as well as visiting universities across Taiwan to help students prepare for their end-of-term final exams.
He then turned to porn sites to extend his reach.
“We thought of putting our videos in the most jarring place,” he said of the decision to shoot his content off to a platform that’s most known for catering to sexual—rather than academic—frustrations.
Over about a year, Chang saw unprecedented traffic to his teaching material as more students purchased the courses on his websites. He also succeeded in earning enough to pay off his debts.
Comments such as: “Nothing like a nice Delta-Epsilon Proof for my post-nut clarity" are quite familiar, and Chang says he hopes his journey will inspire others to think outside of the box.
Watch this space for the latest developments.
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