>>47105256Did you know Astel removed "Holostars" from his twitter bio? Because he outright said people won't watch if they see he's Holostars, and he has new viewers showing up expressing surprise he's a part of that group and even his collab partners going "aren't you an idol?" whenever he acts too crazy. People associate the brand with male idols and think they're just male Hololive instead of a normal group of dudes, so they won't give them a chance.
And then you have their own company audience who were cultivated and grown to enjoy female idol vtubers, so they don't care about Holostars either. It doesn't matter that they were featured to 100k people on New Years, that audience isn't interested even if reception to their performance was positive.
They literally cannot win. Especially when Nijimales already captured the female demographic while Holostars were still recovering from Cover breaking their legs at debut. Their only chances are networking outside, but it's more than just collabing with people outside, you need to grab hold of a group, like Roberu did with Tamaki's group or Astel with the FPS crowd, and you have to do it consistently or get lucky to go viral, and most of the members just aren't interested in doing that. People fault them for that but Hololive is pretty insular too, but at least they have their own huge audience, an audience Holostars don't benefit from.