>>29167723This is just an unavoidable side-effect of the vtuber industry professionalizing. The big agencies have grown long since past the point of needing to rely on unproven potential talent. Sure, back when Holo/Niji were much smaller in stature and draw, they could much less afford to be selective in their hiring process and had to take in sometimes many unproven randos basically off the street. And yes, some of those turned out to be great, and sentimentally, those are always the best cinderella stories for fans.
But after a business reaches a certain size, these sentimentalisms mean less and less, and they are looking for (and are receiving) much more "professional" applicants, i.e. people who have been doing the online content creator thing (or specifically the vtuber thing, another simple effect of time - years ago there simply weren't as many vtubers around, so most of your applicants were non-vtubers. Nowadays, with the growth of the medium, most of the people who apply for Holo/Niji were already vtubers before, so it's only natural that you get more talents with previous vtubing experience).
With the thousands of applicants they receive each time, they simply have to use criteria to narrow down the pool to the people that actually have the attributes they're looking for. Of course "proven track record of previous content creation experience" will play a role, along with "previous noombahs", the logic being that "hey, because person A has managed to achieve XYZ subs/views/followers/etc in the past on their own, they must've been doing something right and have good qualities / use that to continue to succeed for us".
Is it a perfect method? Of course not, it still produces duds sometimes, and worthy people with lower noombahs can still get overlooked sometimes. But it's the tendency that the industry, at least from the top down, is continuing to go, and no amount of pining for muh good old days can change that.
I'd suggest looking at the smaller agencies if you want more fresh, unproven people who still have that sentimental "diamond in the rough" potential growth feeling, but even those have begun to raise their standards in response to receiving higher applicant pools.
At this point your best bet is to just stick to dumpster-diving for 0views, although be prepared for seeing most of them quit and never realizing their potential anyway.
