A few years ago, the entire world was contemplating what to do about the emerging threat of COVID-19. Do we lockdown the country? Do we round people up who tested positive and throw them in quarantine? Should everyone simply be stocking up on as much toilet paper as possible and forget the rest? During this time of social panic and contactless interaction, the Vtuber scene found itself poised in the perfect position to farm as many parasocial relationships as possible. With everyone locked in their homes possessing extra time on their hands, Vtuber producing company Hololive saw great success with the September 2020 release of their Hololive English group of Vtuber Idols: the Myths. I can’t speak for the business records, but from an outsider’s perspective this shit was a massive success. Every one of the five Vtubers in this group has amassed over 1 million subscribers, with Gura popping off at a breakthrough 4 million. And thus the great rise of Vtubing accelerated in the West throughout the remainder of the year and onwards.
About a year later in August of 2021, Hololive announced a second English Vtuber group: The Council. This is where I personally started to fall out of the Vtuber scene. I still enjoy the occasional clip here and there of a Vtuber’s content, but streaming is simply too inconvenient for my schedule to try and realistically keep up with anything they do. Still as my personal involvement dwindled, an audience remained primed and ready to see what this latest batch of idols would cook up. The answer? A ton of collab streams my guy. Previously streams between the English and Japanese idols were a tad rare for most of the talent due to language barriers, and while that remained true, there were now so many English Vtubers they could make a ton of collaborative content on their own in the same way that the larger Japanese cast could. Thus more success was to be found, as this newer idol batch from 2021 all sit above 750k subscribers on YouTube.
I don't know a damn one of these people, but blessed be this promo art.
Much to my surprise, I have been living under a rock for a couple of weeks now because Hololive has already released another English Vtuber group, Advent, at the end of July of this year. And I had to ask myself: am I unaware because I’m simply falling out of the Vtuber algorithm, or are people losing interest in the concept? I wanted to lean toward the second explanation, but after doing a bit of checking it honestly seems like people are once again excited for new idols. Each of the new members have already amassed over 300k subscribers in like, three fucking weeks. A quick lookup of the Google Trends data on “Vtuber” and “Hololive” worldwide also shows consistent interest in the idea with spikes of activity around the recent debuts.
This is just relative popularity of the term to itself, not to each other, so interest in both is still pretty solid.
Personally I’m a bit dumbfounded. To me the Vtuber market has clearly become a bit saturated. Keep in mind we’re now talking about 14 English idols, solely under Hololive. There are other groups and businesses with their own talent, not to mention a bunch of Vtubers who have made solo careers without a corporate backing. To me there’s simply so many in play I’m a bit overwhelmed. Perhaps if their content was more like regular YouTube videos I could understand keeping up a bit better, but since streaming is the primary form of content for most of them, I don’t comprehend how anyone could stay up to date with their favorite two Vtubers, let alone the overall industry itself. I assume people are simply picking their waifu and staying loyal to them, but how many generations can we go through before people feel burnt out? With regular idols there are huge gaps in production content since they mostly focus on music releases which makes it rather easy to stay involved in the hobby without fearing being left behind. I’m simply wondering if all this expansion is going to ultimately be a downside with how many Vtubers are already active both under contract and solo.
These seem like incredible numbers given the debut timeline.
But hey, if anyone listened to me we would have stopped at one group of English Vtubers and missed out on a bunch of shipping, er, collab streams that made bank. Apologies for the fat article, but I wanted to do justice to just how much this one aspect of Vtubing has grown over the years. Living under the radar I never would have imagined so many talents debuting and still seeing healthy subscriber counts. Is Hololive expanding too much? Is Vtubing going to be a concept with staying power rather than a mere trend? Are you still staying current with any Vtubers, from a company or otherwise? Check out the new idols, learn their characters, and realize you’re already behind on hours of streaming lore in the comments below!
