THERE'S A LOT OF WORDS BELOW
SCROLL LIKE YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT
TL;DR at the bottom. I'm of two minds about thiis. First things first though, let me throw rikus trust funded flunkees school project in the trash, nobody there has a brain cell to even make decisions with and I 100% believe they will auto-pilot that shit until the day the corpo crashes and riku finds his next toy to ignore.
But as for REAL vtubing, Yagoo is wrong. But depending on whqt he does, he might end up realizing thst himself.
Anybody who isn't a friendless isolated NEET qnd has been here since COVID knows people that uave drifted away from or dropped off from vtubing. Anybody who got sucked into the magic at any point in the past probably knows that a good number of people who left after getting burned. Everybody is entitled to their opinion but if your sample size is big enough you probably knew some people who you think probably didn't deserve to get burned like they did. Though obviously there are plenty who did it to themselves.
It doesn't take a genius to understand that this hobby has a higher than average chance of burning invested fans. The chance of being burnt increases with investment. This is true for ALL hobbies, of course; but in vtubing, the feelings and relationships and interdependencies that risk factors spawn from are simultaneoisly the draw and cause for invested fans to become invested in the first place.
This is a feature and not a bug. It's not even something that can be "fixed". Though maybe i should be specific; the statement is not applicable to non-JP side vtubing.
And he doesn't need to or have to care about non-JP side vtubing. He's a CEO and he's doing fucking amazing as is and has no reason to try to make any desperate pulls.
But that doesn't change the point of my post; the idea that vtuber growth is stsgnant and truly oversaturated and mostly tapped for growth, is wrong. It's wrong for the EN side specifically; regardless of whether you think it matters or not, it doesn't change the fact that it exists and so does a lot of potential future growth. ESPECIALLY when it comes to revenue, in the the form of consumer willingness to spend. And there have been occassional rare signs proving that very fact, here and there.
But the high growth potential on this side isn't something that stems from new potential viewers, at least not primarily. It stems from luring back people who got burned. It is easier to fall back into an old pattern even if it ended badly; at the moment any vtubers who have ended up capitalizing on capturing those ex-invested viewers did so by chance instead of intent. And it worked well for them, though its doubtful they realized what happened. I only do because of my awful habit of resding chat chronically during streams, names and all, alongside my useless talent of rebembering a name for fucking eternity even if I've only seen it a few times.
But if somebody could figure out the secret formula for unburning those burned viewer, and began doing so in a targeted, deliberate, and even mildly eye-catching way, they would be probably be wble to steadily draw in a literal more than 5 years long chain of burned viewers that are out there. If they really focused, it wouldn't even be that hard to incline; old viewers who got burned are almost definitely going to be closer together in terms of what the Youtube algorithm thinks, and therefore getting old viewers means spiking chances of other old viewers getting a recommendation for a stream, and so on...
All you have to do is figure out how to convince people who hurt enough to fuck off to give it a look and make sure what tbey see makes them feel like it won't happen this time. I'm not so stupid to just act like there's no way to do it, because of course there is probably SOME way. I'm defiitely not smart enough to have a clue about what it is, and more importsntly I don't think the people who run the industry are smart enough to think of it either, and that's disregarding whether or not they would even care enoigh to try even if they were
.
TL;DR: There is a very large pool of accessible potential growth in the number of medium/high spending dedicated viewers, and because of the size of the EN scene that pool is very large in terms of proportionality to the total active viewerbase in comparison to Japans scene. That pool is composed of viewers who have been burned by a vtub/er/ers/ing company.
Regardless of personal opinions people might have about the EN scene specifically, I am merely stating that it is a fact that there is absolutely a prospective path to grow(or re-grow, if you want to call it that) substantial numbers across the board. Of course, that doesn't mean anybody should be compelled to act upon that, even if they could.
I'm saying one thing and one thing only; there IS an avenue for growth left to pursue, and that's just a simple fact.
hit char limit lmao
YOU CAN STOP SCROLLING
THE WALL HAS PASSED
YOU MADE IT SAFELY ACROSS
