>>16199708Duets are a buff. They also require more work and with someone else. And we're talking about women here so pettiness and jealousy are at play. This cover just happened to have two genmates who get along well, are both incredibly popular relative to other vtubers, and who were able to agree to have the cover on one channel where it sucked in bother their viewerbases and presumably got embedded in the algorithm. Basically the stars aligned for this cover,and the view count shows.
For chubas not on such good terms with each other, Reine and Risu did a good example of how to still pull something like this off with their Kakusei Dualism renditions, even if the metrics aren't great as a result of a variety of debuffing factors such as lower popularity and potentially misleading ID branding.
Maybe someone should fund some research and surveys into why ID gets significantly lower numbers on their covers, especially compared to a cover of a song that is...to be fair, not actually that good. And people have heard it countless times already as the King cover meme has been a thing for a long while.
My own take is that it really is just a matter of algorithm before quality, and that's actually kind of depressing as someone who'd rather have quality. Yeah, the King duet cover will get 13 million views, and Stardust Song is sitting at 1.6 million, but I genuinely think the latter sounds better and has far more effort, soul and production value put into it such that the entire YouTube numbers game only comes off as looking like viewers get shortchanged as a result of creators being incentivized to produce assembly line videos rather than innovating and taking risks.
tldr I'm salty because these numbers are a bitter reminder that my viewing experience will be worsened because YouTube rewards pandering to the Lowest Common Denominator. Makes it really hard to argue with authoritarianism, when the underlying premise of people being tasteless rubes isn't incorrect.
Congrats to Gura and Mori though. You won the algorithm game by making a popular derivative of something that had been done a thousand times already by countless others. The big numbers and big money are worth being proud of from a materialistic perspective, even if critics like myself may be dissatisfied with the current state of content creation in general. With that said, this really does belong in the numberfag general. Trying to smear it in people's faces on the catalog is undignified, and I'm saying this without even caring about other chubas feelings, although I do think it's funny that they're probably seething right now.
