emachan12 said:

No pls no

This is kiana's endgame and I'm pretty sure mei reciprocates.

emachan12 said:

No pls no

Their gayness are canon. Mei even gladly sacrifice the world for Kiana

dog meets dog

Awoo meets louder awoo.

Well this escalated quickly.

Missing a bubble here

You can hear the "ehehehehe~" when you give her both headpats and ear scratch

Gollgagh said:

I was intentionally avoiding the hololive girls, but she's starting to win me over.

The Hololive girls are honestly great. I didn't expect Vtubers to be so entertaining at first, but they're often really funny and at the very least some of them are actually really good at video games. Korone here is also just so wholesome, as an example have this video of her thanking the people that translate and share her content. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsBxd7nr12Q

Gollgagh said:

I was intentionally avoiding the hololive girls, but she's starting to win me over.

It's rather curious how recently 2D Vtubers are growing at a much faster rate than than the 3D(Kizuna Ai, Mirai Akari, etc).

I'd presume it's because of the scripted nature of the 3D Vtubers not only make them harder to upload on a daily/weekly basis(appeal to Youtube algorithm) as well as coming off as less genuine than 2D livestreamers.

But then of course, there's also thousands of minor independent Vtubers who couldn't break 1K subs regardless of whether they use a 2D or 3D avatar(many Hololive girls themselves, Korone included, had independent channels that either failed or just were nowhere nearly as successful). So it might just be purely thanks to Hololive/Nijisanji just flat out having more marketing budget.

azurelorochi said:

It's rather curious how recently 2D Vtubers are growing at a much faster rate than than the 3D(Kizuna Ai, Mirai Akari, etc).

I think i can help a bit with this, having fallen in the V-tubert hole myself.

In the case of those 3D examples, i guess they ran out of steam, they haven't been growing or getting as much attention for 1 year or more now and a lot of them don't even upload consistently anymore. With Kizuna Ai it was mostly the original actress leaving that caused it so, there are cases and cases.

As you said, the ones growing the most are making long live streams like on twich, or the opposite, 30s meme shitpost. The point is to just produce a lot of stuff per week and the algorithm might love you.
But it's not 2D Vtubers in general, specifically Hololive streamers have seen a massive surge this year.
They're growing around 7-10k subs per week on average (22k for Korone), as opposed to the most popular Nijisanji v-tubers at 2-4k.

It's been a mix of good marketing timing and natural appeal. Like, the first big boost was in January, partially because of the big special 3D event but, mostly because of Gen 4's debug attracting new people.
Coco brought in a lot of new viewers with her Asacoco streams, both from the Japanese side of people watching it before work, but also the english viewers. From then, the rest of the girls have been trying to connect with their international fans, which just brought in more people.
Then there was the big ~May spike; the lockdown forcing us to stay inside and watch streams or funny videos.
A lot of us staring with just one translated video, were taken down the recommended rabbit hole. Since they're a pretty close, interconnected group, if you watch a Matsuri bandaid, Rushia "Go home", or an Aqua gamer rage clip, YT will recommend you more Hololive stuff in general.

Bit unrelated but i'm also glad that besides corporate-operated huge JP VTubers, English-speaking, independend virtual streamers and VTubers are getting more and more popular. Don't get me wrong, seeing Korone or Subaru or others doing dumb shit is great, but being greeted personaly and asked how my day was by cute catgirl with ~30 ppl watching her on Twitch hits on a completely different note. Or interacting with said catgirl on Twitter like with you know, normal human being.

Also lately i discovered who started EN Vtubing and ffs saying "they just copy Japan" sucks when ppl that created this independed scene actualy worked in Japanese VTubing long before Kizuna AI was a thing and created like 90% of tools and infrastructure network used by entire community.

And yes, contrary to popular belief Kizuna AI was not first Virtual Youtuber, she just was first one that get so big worldwide.

keonas said:

stuffs

I get what you're saying, Hololive certainly is the fastest growing Vtuber brand but as Mix&Match also said, I just feel cynical sometimes what decides the success of a Vtuber(or let's be honest, most entertainment medias in general) isn't the quality of the individual but the marketing push of the company.

And this isn't meant to be reductive to Hololive or Nijisanji in any way, it is indeed the individual's own charm and skills that keep the audiences coming back, but at the same time considering many of them previously had failed independent channels also means if they weren't acknowledged by the big companies to give them the marketing bucks, many will just drown in obscurity forever regardless of personal skills.

Having just 30 people watch you might give you a warm sense of personal connection, but it's just never going to be financially worth it spending 4+ hours every day streaming just to such a small crowd.

I mean you can just look at Holostars themselves. They also are under the Cover umbrella, yet their biggest hitter(Rikka) only has 30K subs after debuting for a whole year. And that's despite Rikka raking in easy 500K+ views whenever he does song collab with Matsuri(his solo song covers are predictably more middle of the road in views).

And you can't just talk it off that "male Vtubers just have it harder in general", Nijisanji has plenty of male Vtubers who already made 100K subs in less than 3 months of debut.

I started watching(or rather listening) to Vtubers from their song covers, so naturally I find a ton of obscure Vtubers out there who certainly are as every bit as talented as the big names when it comes to singing(if not better), yet never even made it beyond 3K subs. Of course this is nothing new, non-Vtuber music channels have been suffering the same problem for as long as Youtube existed.

Again, I'm not trying to be reductive to either Hololive or Nijisanji, just pointing out that it's a massively unfair market.

Flat is Justice!

At least she got a lot taller.

well i mean .... you can still fix that after you got that second crest out of the way

Hips for days tho.