>>10843979Knowing the existence of Male Vtubers, and having the motivation to watch them is different. Let's go through the different groups because the demographics are complicated:
There are the people who only watch clips and know little to no Japanese. Hololive has both the most clips and are the most famous clips. The casuals will watch a few clips and maybe keep up with a certain clip channel or whatever drifts into their youtube algorithm. It doesn't matter that they aren't opposed to male vtubers, or even that they get a clip of one or two male vtubers they watch, it's that the numbers will be disproportionately female Vtubers and they'll sub to female vtubers. This is similar to people who are fished into the community by /r/Hololive from reddit's all or meme pages, or TrashTaste, or any other location where people somehow get filtered into Hololive. This contributes to the overwhelming presence of female Vtubers in the west.
Next group of people, people who watch streams. There are two groups: people who only watch English streams and the people who will go into Japanese streams. For English onlys, the popular English speaking Vtubers are basically all female. VShojo, HoloEN, NijiEN, all the other agencies like PRISM or whatever. Basically all females. This further makes it so people looking to toy with investing in the western Vtuber market see that primarily females suceed and mistakenly attribute it to them being female and think not to risk it with male Vtubers, causing even more female Vtubers to come into prominence. Further, they probably if they were stream watchers before, already know males who speak English that stream which they regularly watch, and ergo see no need to watch English speaking male vtubers (of which there are few) when they already had quality male streamers to watch. Next, the Japanese stream watchers: these people will typically watch the stream of their oshi, which is typically one of the people they were introduced to early on. This leads to primarily oshis from Hololive (females), with a fair amount going to Nijisanji or some potentially to Holostars. Regardless, in terms of popularity, females will be disproportionately popular, even if male talent and female talent are equal and people's tastes to watch females and males are equal.
The last point I want to make, is about the people who would bring up gachikois & GFE; but people overestimate how much of English speakers comprise that. Gachikois are way more a Japanese phenomenon, the hololive Vtubers that appeal to gachikois get significantly less English viewerships, and yet Japan is still the location with more popular male Vtubers. This all leads to that it's the initial predominance of Hololive in clipping that leads to the disproportionate popularity of female Vtubers.
The reasoning for female vtubers being vastly more popular than males, really has nothing to do with differing tastes of the west. It's just Hololive blew up with the target demographic who would allow them to ride youtube's algorithm the rest of the way.
