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>every holo is actually a trillionaire which is why most of them still live with their mother. Wawa's money-issue was psy-ops
Alright... the whole 'money conspiracy' thing clearly isn't the point of this thread, so allow me to kill it now so we can refocus.
These are youtubers; not Hollywood mannequins. Depending on source-estimate, only ~30% of the superchats actually go to them. Ditto for Memberships.(Anyone who's ever had a consignment job can tell you that's actually generous. Usually you get 10-20%) And they technically 'have' a salary but it's the same sort as tipped employees like waitress where it's entirely eaten up in taxes and you're supposed to live on commissions. And, as far as merch goes... some of the girls are unaware they even 'have' merch sometimes, so that should say enough about how little, if any, of that trickles down to them. Cover, like all corpos, is only really lucrative for the shareholders.
To put a number on this, let's go to hololyzer and look at Kronii just to pick an example.
+ Let's assume, as mentioned earlier, that her regular salary and her taxes cancel each other out. (That's usually the norm for commissioned or tipped employees and makes the calculation much easier.)
+ So, Kronii's median SC ranking is ~￥250,000 or ~1,700 USD.
+ Let's assume the generous 30% cut; 30% of 1700 is 510 USD.
+ Let say she streams biweekly, so 8 streams a month; 510 x 8 = 4080 USD per month.
+ Now, for memberships. The highest number of members ever seen on one of her streams at once was 1890 for her anniversary, which is probably as close to perfect attendence as it's gonna get, so let's just say 2000 is the norm.
+ Monthly membership is 5 USD. So; 5 x 2000 = 10,000 USD monthly from her regular members.
+ Again, let's say her cut is the generous 30%. 30% of 10,000 is 3000 USD.
+ So, we add 4080 from SCs to 3000 from memberships to get an income estimate of $7080 monthly.
+ There's 12 months in a year, so 7080 x 12 = An annual income estimate of 84,960.
AND NOW, the talent's expenses.
In case anyone was unaware, Cover does not reimburse the girls for any equipment or commission costs. They're forced to pay that out of their own pocket. Matsuri first mentioned this in a 2021 stream and she and Marine have both talked about it several times since that making an original animation MV will run them around 1-2 million yen ($6.9k to $13.8k) and that's the reason why most of the girls can only afford to have one or two original songs. Bae burning though her $10k bonus in a single project a couple weeks ago also falls dead center into this range. We'll use that as our working estimate since 10 is a nice simple number.
-Let's once again be overly generous and say that a cover costs half as much as an original song to make. (Since the only thing this saves is lyrics, it's almost certainly a lot more.) In 2022, Kronii had one cover (1 x 5,000) and one original (1 x 10,000), so -15,000 annual estimate in nonreimbused expenses.
- 84,960 - 15,000 = Net annual income estimate of $69,960 USD for Ouro Kronii.
tl;dr: If you plug the math, the holo idols are turning about the same salary as a mid-tier white collar job. I was making about the same during my own dark days as a corpo scumbag. They're not poor, but a far cry from rich. I guarantee you that their emotional connection with their fanbase matters a hell of a lot more to them than does their paycheck.
