I was bored and decided to compare REALITY and AniLive in terms of money donated to the top 20 earners. They have pretty much the same event system. Let's take the Japanese server first. The top 20 got 34.3 million coins total in August on REALITY. As a viewer, you can get 15.8k coins for 108 USD (146 coins for 1 USD) in the app, or use their sale offer that appears every 1-2 weeks and gets promoted heavily on Twitter and buy coins on the web version (219 coins for 1 USD). Not everyone uses those, and you can only buy them once or twice a week, so let's assume only 30% of coins are received through these lucrative sales while 70% of coins are bought regularly in the app. You can also get 30 coins for free by doing missions—watching streamers—and another 60 coins by watching 6 ads daily. At most, I would predict these free coins make up only 10% of the total coins sent at most. Doing some math, the top 20 got around 170k USD sent to them in August. To compare, YouTube’s top 20 earners received around 600k USD total before cuts in August according to Playboard.
The US server is not their first priority, their events are shit, and it has a very different audience. So the top 20 there only made 27k USD in August.
Now, in AniLive, you can get 13300 coins for 200 USD (66.5 coins for 1 USD). In August, the top 20 got 1.7-1.8 million coins. There are more free coins given out daily, and new users get a lot of them, so I would estimate that free coins make up at least 30% of total coins. Let's also ignore regional price differences. Doing some math, we can estimate that people spent around 19k USD on coins on AniLive last month.
Now I make a lot of assumptions here. There are some factors you can't really account for, such as the fact that you can also exchange coins on REALITY that you get as a streamer and send them to another person, basically creating a money circle. Some streamers do this to support their friends in events, so there is probably less money spent than estimated. But still, you can say that it's not a bad result for AniLive as a new app if you consider it purely as a competition for the REALITY's US audience. That is, if you ignore that REALITY makes even more money through their gacha, that they don't have custom models (you get a basic one and modify it as you want), and the fact that some AniLive events probably hardly make them a profit.
Tldr AniLive is nowhere close to REALITY if you take it wholly but might eventually compete for the English-speaking audience. Maybe.
