>>5099945Naru and Air are a very particular case in which they were a sub-unit called VOIZ, in a somewhat stand-alone way within Nijisanji SEEDS, of idols targetting women.
They lost a bit of the initial momentum because they debuted after the others and were prohibited from collabing with Niji's gens 1&2 + the other Seeds. Their main platform was also mirrativ, while Nijisanji's main platforms were Youtube and NND. That unit failed within two months, with 2 of it's four members graduating, before being transferred to Nijisanji Seeds proper four months later after the failure and restarting actives.
And then they had to be turned from wannabe virtual idols whose shtick was singing and acting into streamers, so they pretty much wasted their first year and were trying to not only find their footing with streaming but discover what kind of content they wanted to do and what audience to cater to - while being part of Nijisanji SEEDs, a group who was an experiment of letting chubas on a loose leash and see what they'd come up with.
The situation was further complicated by:
Them getting a bunch of hate because they were the champions of the first Niji Mario Kart cup when they were two nobodies, so they had the other fans of bigger Nijis bitching at them.
In Air's case, he streams infrequently, usually two times a week - because apparently he is a workaholic to the point of having been hospitalized twice because of overwork.
He also, once revealed that his userbase was 82% women, in other words, he actually appealed to fujos - which means he repelled regular people and the mostly-male vtuber viewerbase. More recently he has been growing and that meant his viewerbase actually went down to 65% female (around December 2020).
In Naru's case: First, he didn't have the structure to stream properly, his internet and PC were shit and he had no capture card, so he streamed to mirrativ (since it's made for phones) and did PS4 streaming. He only started streaming properly in Mach of 2019 - that's it, almost one year after his debut.
Naru also had his new Nijisanji manager not like his avatar for some got forsaken reason and force some rather uninteresting avatar on him which he kept using for two fucking years and made him pretty miserable too.
The only reason they didn't quit was because the two wanted to stay there for the fans who had supported them (which in Naru's case also includes his mother, who watches every one of his broadcasts and every now and then lets her presence be known).
Things only started to improve last August when they apparently got a new manager, who actually cares about them and wants to work with them but has the tough job of unfucking almost three years of mismanagement. [spoiled] Also, the unfortunate loss of his job due to Covid's economic downturn also seem to have helped Naru's channel, as he started streaming more frequently and it coincides with his recent growth.[/spoiler:lit]
