>>42182616The problem for EN is that the English language mediascape is massive with huge amounts of money involved and a big focus on mass appeal within that very large mediascape.
Here anime is also a very fringe product. There's also no normalisation of the use of cute anime girls in society. You go to Japan and its normal for fucking everything to have a cute anime girl character. Companies, products, public services, etc the list is absurd.
Here the focus for advertising deals with external entities is with celebrities and that market is basically owned almost entirely by sports and Hollywood.
Nobody is going to pay Cover much to have their no name anime girls slapped on their product. A few companies with overlap in terms of their customer base might but they're not going to offer much. A good example would be G-Fuel who a while back went on a spree of buying product placement deals with vtubers. Mainly focusing on indy vtubers they paid them a few thousand to plug them and have a G-Fuel shaker bottle asset on display as part of their model for a few months.
Cover wouldn't take that deal, it's too small. But it's the best they're likely to ever get in the English mediascape. That Taco Bell ad placement for Gura? She was a background presence in it, no voice lines no nothing. Just a single frame of stock footage. I wouldn't be shocked if it was put in by accident and someone in the ad company realised too late and went to Cover to work something out, maybe throwing them a bit of cash to avoid having to redo a part of the ad. That we've seen nothing else since suggests to me this was the case.
>>42182910My suspicion here is they saw the success of Nijis males and went "may as well try it"
There's a few reasons to do it outside of this though.
In theory the market for male vtubers is more female orientated while the market for female vtubers is basically only males.
So you release those two male waves? The market isn't going to have huge overlap, it'll expand your viewership in the west with minimal cannibalisation of your existing viewership.
If you can expand your viewerbase rather than oversaturating your existing one with options that can help you get wider viewership which increases your potential in terms of access to the sort of sponsorship deals that Cover actually wants.
Plus Cover has no male presence in the EN market. It's entirely virgin territory to expand into for them. Which only makes it more attractive.
Finally so long as they're covering their costs then all is good. Covers concern with LiveEN3 is they won't be able to cover costs and will reduce income for the other girls.
Also as to why do two waves? Simple. Vtubers need collabs to avoid becoming stale. Its a key part of the industry. The JP stars are basically useless on this front because of the language barrier.
The EN girls have proven that two gens is typically enough to cover this front. So I suspect if we see Cover push into any new market (say language specific ones) they'll go a minimum of two gens of three or four again.
