VTubing: How a Japanese Phenomenon Is Going Worldwide
I explored the explosive growth of VTubing, from its niche origins in Japan to its global expansion. By interviewing industry professionals and multilingual VTubers, I uncovered how corporate giants like hololive and NIJISANJI dominate the market while indie creators navigate the challenges of standing out. The piece reveals the unique appeal of animated avatars and the cultural clashes between Japanese management styles and international talent.
The assumption is that one chooses to be a VTuber to make up for something that they don't have, when that's simply not true.
- krige
That's a bit... late to the party. I can't find when the article was published, but the phenomenon "went worldwide" several years ago by the means of COVID. These days the vtubing as an industry is in a somewhat stable state, if not a possible decline, going by viewership hours over the same period. Many big EN and JP names have already retired too.
- animal531
Some more interesting topics around the subject that I haven't seen covered in the comments:
- Hololive is huge and they definitely take a decent cut for their efforts. But why do people sign with them? The short answer is that they're a well oiled machine where people go through a sign up process where they create a test video etc. If accepted they're placed into groups (such as Hololive English) etc., but at the same time they also get to interact with all the other groups which immediately raises their popularity significantly.
They also look for some other related skills, for example probably all of the English group can sing semi-professionally on a stage etc.
In general your success is pretty much guaranteed once accepted, it just becomes a question of scale.
- Downsides: Usually the vtuber character, name, image and all other related copyrights belong to them. If there are disagreements then you can leave depending on your contract, but you can no longer use that character in any way. For example Nimi Nightmare used to be Fauna in Hololive, but she left and restarted on her own, whereas some other really popular streamers left but never seemed to resurface.
In general they also don't seem to collaborate much with vtubers outside of their space, so I'm sure there are some rules in play there.
- rmunn
The first time I encountered VTubing, I thought the point was just to hide your face, for various reasons. Being sensitive about your looks, not wanting to attract stalkers, whatever. But there's apparently a lot more to it; I was surprised.
- unsignedint
I'm a Vtuber myself. I'm an indie, self supported, just for fun type rather than someone trying to make a living from it.
If you're genuinely interested in becoming a Vtuber, the barrier to entry is surprisingly low. You don't necessarily need to commission a custom model or a unique character design. You can use one of the VR avatar generators, which is what my avatar is based on, or even start with a modified VR avatar if its license allows it. That's actually a pretty common approach in the indie scene.
As the article mentions, the market is definitely saturated, so I wouldn't go into it expecting to make a lot of money. For what it's worth, a large number of Vtubers don't even meet YouTube's monetization threshold. Personally, I think that's part of what makes the community interesting. I tend to enjoy following smaller creators more than the big agency names.
One thing I'd add is that I think the article overgeneralizes the AI topic a bit and leans more toward wishful thinking. A lot of the hesitation around AI, especially at major agencies, comes from the fact that their character designs are often commissioned from well known artists. That creates a relationship between the performer and the artist, often referred to as the "Mama" or "Papa" relationship, and there can be a lot of sensitivity around how those designs are used. To be fair, those dynamics can show up in plenty of situations besides AI.
If you don't have those constraints, people tend to be much more relax […]
- vehemenz
The last section should have been titled “Why Do People Watch It?” because I finished the article still wondering.