>>90198559>Why can't vtubers mimic Hololive's success and defeat it at its own game?Visibility, mostly. It's a huge issue, to the point where I actually did some research (I've had my own streamer ambitions) and between me and a couple friends, we came to the conclusion that it is not possible to make it big purely as a livestreamer on your own without being INSANELY lucky in some manner - being talented helps your chances, but it will never make your success certain.
It's not about whether you're entertaining; the reality is that you only get to entertain people if they're willing to give you a chance. Even if you're a content god that can attract anyone into continuing to watch you within 10 seconds of exposure (note, most people are not this, I'm just exaggerating for the sake of argument) you still need to get tons of people to watch those first 10 seconds, and the reality is that you almost certainly cannot find any way to get those "first 10 seconds" without outside assistance.
There are plenty of competently entertaining streamers out there. But the reality is that if *all* you are is an incredibly competent (as in entertaining) streamer, that still doesn't have the mindshare to become big. It will *never* be enough on its own.
This is true even for hololive. If you ask what the most popular parts of hololive are, you might answer "the streams, of course" but no, you're wrong - it's individual moments from those streams, of which the most entertaining ones are always conveniently clipped by hololive's ridiculously dedicated clipper base; that's how most people got their first 10 seconds of exposure. It's how basically everyone I know got into it. Streams, on their own, have close to zero marketability and outreach, and that's why so many content creators (not limited to VTubers, but it's more obvious here) do so many seemingly unprofitable things outside of their livestreams; it's about getting that initial mindshare. Other popular activities include music and 3D idol activities, which, well, hololive does better than most other VTuber agencies.
>Aside from 3Ds, which most fans don't care about, there's no reason why Hololive can't be toppled.Aside from that being factually incorrect (big 3D stuff is incredibly kino and vtuber fans love that kind of stuff), topping hololive, even in an ideal vacuum where you are 'more entertaining', still requires a pile of miracles to happen (including the miracle of not collapsing at any point in the process of getting this popular), and toppling hololive requires it suffer a yab of epic proportions, and so far hololive has been good at, if not dodging yabs (it gets hit on occasion), managing to sweep those yabs aside and not have them turn into major problems that derail the entire company. You can argue that the agency is mostly a PR machine, but it's one of the damn best PR machines I've ever seen. 2024 was rough for hololive (losing Mel, Amelia, and Aqua is not nothing) but compared to NijiEN's epic self-destruct to being practically on life support (though JP is not collapsing as far as I know, so Niji itself will live for a while longer), Kawaii and Prism Project shutting down entirely, and idol selling off to brave group to remain nominally alive, well... yeah.
