>>12860987-The Azur Line collab was huge and brought in Chinese viewerbase and Chinese clippers who also uploaded English translations on Youtube, this set the ball rolling for Holo dominating the algorithm for non-Japanese viewers. However, by and large, Nijisanji actually got more clips until after Hololive's breakout success and clippers simply jumped ship after they saw which clips got views. That does mean the Chinese clippers were very important for Hololive early on and they worked hard at translating as much stuff as they could. Also, for whatever reason some Hololive clips went very viral: Lots of stuff by Pekora and Aqua, those aforementioned Fubuki shitposts and some other clips, Miko saying nigger, Matsuri band-aids, Rushia's boing-boing, and Suisei getting discovered by her parents had a lot of views early on and it's probably not a coincidence that Suisei and Miko have "always" had a huge foreign following. As a sidenote, there were and are a lot of messages on 4chan and elsewhere complaining about overseas Nijifans being elitist in the clip comment sections and forums; it does seem that the behaviour of the fanbase made quite a few people turn away from Niji and embrace Holo, whose fans were at least seen as being happy to answer dumb newfag questions and shill their oshis. (Also, it seems that /hlg/'s Bullysanji meme got some legitimate traction amongst lurking Redditors and Twittertards and they spread it making clueless audiences further shirk away from Nijisanji. The funny thing here is that I remember there was a schizo Nijifag on /vyt/ who bragged about "trolling" /hlg/ by posting it and watching them swallow the narrative hook, line and sinker. Again, maybe not that big of a deal, but it would be absolutely hilarious if a single deranged Nijifag in his misguided attempts to own Holofags caused major problem for his true oshi, Anykara.)
-Also, Nijisanji got foreign interest earlier, but for whatever reason they didn't feel that it was worth pursuing and some of their chuubas may or may not have outright tried to expel English-speaking viewers. However, Haachama went all in on the eigo pandering (also Haachama Cooking) and Korone to a lesser extent (Eekum Bookum and other clips were very big); eventually Coco kinda sorta followed suit by translating Asacoco and doing Reddit Meme Reviews. However, initially Holos were kinda like Nijis in that they didn't seem to know what to do with the foreigners and tried to ignore them and this included Coco. After she did, Coco was extremely important in introducing audiences to Hololive through those two programmes. Her inspiring Hololive to play ARK seems to have also been one of those not-immediately obvious boosts as whole-company collabs boosted everyone. (Some other collab games like Project Winter and 2019 Mario Kart Tournament may have also given small boosts) Also, Artia was the first to engage with Reddit and one of the firsts to pander to English-speakers.
-First Holofes seems to have gotten some attention; Suisei's first live was free on Youtube and apparently convinced a lot of people on the fence that this might actually be an idol group worth keeping eye on; at the very least it convinced people to watch Suisei who went from 3k average viewers to 10k almost overnight. It may have helped that the concert happened right at the beginning of the viewership boom. As a sidenote it seems like Suisei was almost single-handedly responsible for attracting Arte Refact which is pretty much the biggest nerd music company in Japan and wrote most of the Bloom songs, but who knows what exactly went on behind the scenes. This probably set up further music industry contacts, but those might have happened anyway. Also maybe Arte Refact was already looking for a Holo and would have just settled on someone else in the absence of Suisei; but if they were just looking for a chuuba then it might have been a non-Holo they went with were it not for Suisei and she did have to browbeat the (INNK?) management into realizing what they had.
-The viewership boom wasn't because of corona, by the way, Hololive started to incline late 2019 and the big boom happened in the month before any restrictions came out; however, the restrictions may have boosted further the already existing boom.
-Finally Hololive English ended up happening at the exact right moment and the algorithm fell in love with Gura somehow. Evidently the design and her voice are cute, but she's gotta be doing something right with the content be it "a" or whatever. Mori's nerd rap was also something new and exciting to the weeb audience and was a breakaway hit.
I probably forgot something, misremembered everything, and none of this is in order.
