>>54818482eh, for the assessment of "success" it's not enough to just look at them in isolation. Sure, if you just take such a narrow view then yes, they likely made the money back that was spent on them. But for the grander scheme of things, you also have to look at secondary effects.
How much of a new audience did they bring in? And how many of the original HoloEN audience did they cause, either directly or indirectly, to leave? I don't even mean the screeching unicorns on /vt/, but just the larger masses of general cgdct enjoyers who saw the trajectory HoloEN was apparently on and consciously or subconsciously decided "yeah, somehow this just isn't what I originally liked about Hololive anymore..." and filtered out silently.
HoloENs public metrics, like views or SC's, took a noticeable dive during that time. Sure, we can argue all day about how it wasn't all ONLY the homo's fault, and how HoloEN had been in a general state of stagnation and malaise for a while there, but it's also wrong to say the homos had NO effect either, plus remember how it made some HoloEN talents to have revealing bitchy woman moments towards their fanbases for the homos also caused further demoralization and filtering.
The "new audience" the homos brought in is comparatively tiny (and more important, they don't even watch streams or spend money as much as the original audience of the girls, see how much the homo fans are rather cut from the typical "prefer lazy social media activism" cloth"), and while we may never be able to really tell how much of the girls' original audience they caused to leave, but going just by pure statistics alone: the girls' audience is many times larger than the homos' audience, so even if they caused "just" 10% of the girls' audience to leave, that's probably more than all the tiny new viewers the homos brought in - so they probably ended up being a net negative for HoloEN in the long run.
