the dopamine blog
what 32,000 fake orders reveal about what people actually want.
objects of desire · 4 min read
South Korea breaks the duopoly of the 40 biggest markets
With no price tag, the RTX 4090 or the MacBook 16 M5 Max wins in 39 of dopamine's 40 biggest markets. Only South Korea trades both for a facial toner worth about $7, roughly 1,450 times cheaper than the RTX 4090.
published Sep 28, 2026
behind the scenes · 5 min read
13 real singers for one joke: localizing the dopamine captain into 14 languages
The same joke about a captain playing a song over the ship's PA exists in all 14 languages of the site, and it swaps in a different real singer 13 times over.
published Sep 27, 2026
world · 4 min read
37% vs. 6%: same kind of launch, two languages, opposite outcomes
Traditional Chinese and Malay went live a week apart with the same goal. Two months later, one made up 37% of its region's orders. The other barely cracked 6%.
published Sep 26, 2026
psychology · 4 min read
The typical Brazilian cart here costs 4,072 hours of labor, and it is completely free
The median order among the site's 3,026 Portuguese-language orders comes to R$30,000. At Brazil's 2026 minimum wage, that is 18.5 months of full-time pay, while nearly seven in ten Brazilian families already carry credit card debt just to buy far less than that for real.
published Sep 25, 2026
world · 2 min read
The Vatican placed an order, and so did Antarctica
Orders have arrived from 202 countries and territories. Eighteen of them ordered exactly once, and the list includes the Vatican, Svalbard, Timor-Leste and Antarctica.
published Sep 24, 2026
psychology · 3 min read
ADHD, impulse and the eleven item cart
A good share of the people who use this site arrived from ADHD communities. So we looked up what peer reviewed research measures about impulse buying, and what our own 33,374 orders show about its shape.
published Sep 24, 2026
objects of desire · 3 min read
The 140 products nobody wanted, even for free
Of 3,578 products that have been on the shelf since July, 3,438 have been ordered at least once. The 140 left over share a pattern, and the pattern is embarrassing: they are the sensible ones.
published Sep 23, 2026
psychology · 3 min read
The escalation lasts exactly one session
People who place a second order place it ten minutes after the first, and the cart grows 26%. People who sleep on it come back the same size. The difference is the clock.
published Sep 23, 2026
behind the scenes · 3 min read
One hundred days without charging anyone
The first commit landed on June 10th at 11:58pm. A hundred days later: 33,349 orders from 202 countries and not a single cent charged. The behind the scenes, with numbers from our own database.
published Sep 22, 2026
psychology · 2 min read
The typical cart here costs $30,000, and that is the modest number
We removed price from the equation and measured what desire looks like without it. The median is already high. The average is nine times higher, and that is where it gets interesting.
published Sep 22, 2026
internet · 2 min read
What a dopamine site is, and how to spot a real one
The category was born in South Korea and went global in 2026. Since nobody has properly defined it, here is the definition from someone who runs one.
published Sep 21, 2026
world · 2 min read
200 countries, 9,015 cities, and one college town in Texas
In 90 days orders went out to virtually every country that exists. The third biggest country here is not Germany or the UK. It is Malaysia.
published Sep 21, 2026
15