>>90707730I think both were true, but at various points of their life cycle.
2021 was Coco leaving, and the start of their transition to IP-based model.
From mid 2021 to sometime around mid-2023, everything about streaming was SEVERELY restricted, because all of their money was coming from Youtube and Youtube is a fickle mistress who kept shutting down different types of content willy nilly and Cover had literally no recourse at the time to all the serious monetary damage caused to the girls because of this. Pekora also talked about this, and management said "now is not the time".
They took 2 years to get a bunch of mods for all channels 24x7, PR people, managers and a bunch of other safety nets (still unsure if they got too many or if it's still too little) and brought sales people from other companies to push merch ideas and set up merch production of their own. They also took focus away from streaming for a couple of years to get the girls into the habit of shill streams, promotions and corpo collabs - trying to match with the talent's own interests where possible.
This is what led to 2022 being such a slog for EN, because on top of this shift they had to travel a lot to do 3D stuff in Japan and Cover were obviously flying their talents in for the first time and didn't have a perfect setup, causing issues with many talents (homo audience and omega management probably didn't help either).
Mid-2023 and onwards, they had a solid setup of merch so they slowly started to give talents more leeway in streams (or just not streaming, like some are doing) because most of them bring income through merch and sponsorships now, so even if they do something lewd and get demonetized, it doesn't matter because they can compensate through other sources of income (similar to how youtubers with patreon can say the wildest shit and not have their income affected).
ASMR is still a problem though, because apparently that could lead to channel strikes which would go beyond demonetization - which is why most of them are kept in mengen.
It affects smaller talents disproportionately though since, girls like Noel understand the YT system and can play around it. Idk which side Fauna fell on though.
But anyway, after all this backend shit got ready, they started giving support to streaming and box activities again - stuff like Ark, GTA, ENReco etc. just this year. Alongside more ambitious projects like multiple sololives.
All this is possible because they have enough sponsors and merch being sold to cover their asses, so the entire company won't be brought down if one sololive or one 3D Live or one ASMR stream fails to get traction.
