For the big VTuber corporate brand, for sure. But the indie VTuber scene as exploded. It used to be fairly expensive to get in the hobby, and you needed to be technically savy or have someone be for you. Now there is a lot of free and open-source VTuber software that don't need complex setup, just a webcam. And you can easily commission a few hundred bucks an artist to get your whole character and animation.

This made the barrier almost inexistent. And since showing your actual face was a big stop for a lot of people, vtubing has allowed a lot of people to get into streaming. There are thousands of <100s viewers vtuber right now.

> I can't find when the article was published, but the phenomenon "went worldwide" several years ago by the means of COVID.

Article cites stats from Q1 2026, so presumably this is a current view of the phenomenon.

Yeah it really hit its peak with gen 1 of Hololive English I want to say, along with the explosion of indie vtubers on twitch and stuff that followed.

A lot of female content creators I followed online became vtubers. HikaruStation used to be a singer, but now she’s a whale Vtuber by the name of Bao.

AmaLee (of LeeAndLie) also got famous through anime song covers, but she’s mostly a vtuber now.

I think the current vtuber “market” is a lot harder to break into now than it used to be though.

It quotes figures from Q1 of 2026, so it was definitely published this year.

That's a bigger question, like why do people watch streamers in the first place. It's not for me personally but it's a huge worldwide multibillion industry so plenty of people enjoy it and / or aspire to be it.

I watch a few indie vtubers (and was a fan of idol corp before they got sold off and their first english gen left). I like the streamers and would watch them regardless of what they look like in meatspace

I enjoy a handful of streamers for a few reasons:

* I get to experience games I wouldn't normally have time for: I work full time, and as much as I love games and always make time for them, I still have a finite amount of time to make and a solid chunk of that time has to be devoted to multiplayer games, since it's a big part of how I meet my social needs. And even then, some games that are quite fun to watch for me are games I don't necessarily want to play? Like I love watching people play things like Lethal Company, but I don't have a friend-group to play with, so a streamer is great for that. Also horror games usually have really interesting worlds, but uh... I am a chicken shit LOL

* It also broadens the number of games I'm exposed to quite a bit. Many a time I have tuned into a stream, watched it for awhile, and been like "okay this actually looks really good/fun/interesting" and turned off the stream to go buy it on Steam. I've just bought Claire Obscur because I initially thought it was Yet Another Damn JRPG (objective 1: go to class, final objective: kill god) but I was thoroughly incorrect, and corrected by watching some streamers and an essay on it, and I'm really excited to play it now.

* Additionally, a wild third option: sometimes it's nice when working remotely to have a stream on for background noise. It hits your brain in a way that's vaguely similar to hanging out with a friend when you're both doing completely different things and just... existing together. It's completely fake of course, the streamer has no idea who I am, but it doesn't need to make sense to feel nice to my brain.

I think neuro-sama has been accepted because she isn't deceptive. It's very clear that Neuro-sama isn't a real person or even really intelligent. The other big reason is that she collaborates with other vtubers and has brought new audiences to them.

Also, arguably nowadays the main streamer is Vedal, her (for lack of a better term) handler. Part of the fun is seeing them interact

Does anyone actually believe the premise of Neuro-sama that she is an AI? The original premise was that she is a lightweight AI model livecoded on streams, but that is obviously not the case anymore.

That's one reason. Another big one is it's fun to put on a character. It lets you step away from things you don't like about yourself while embracing the things you do

I've ran once on some streamer who along with the CGI animation also wears some full body suit of anime girl with helmet, wig. That looked like a blend of two ideas. But that's still nothing new - there were always people on youtube who did fully cover their faces to not be recognized.

How to not be seen

There's a lot of indie vtubers who do it for that reason. It's just that the biggest ones are corporate.

That's what many western VTubers don't get, they see it as an "avatar" for themselves which is not what VTubing is. It's supposed to be a completely different persona with no connection to your real identity. It completely dilluted (and I would say even ruined) VTubing in the west.

If I were to make YouTube videos of the camera-to-face variety, I would cloak my face and voice both to avoid stalkers and to avoid deepfakes of each.

But against the flood of videos even before all the AI-generated content churned out by people who don't care about quality, I think I will instead just not make any.

> The two largest vtuber agencies/companies are publicly traded in Japan.

Which makes their popularity as organic as the explosion of the K-Pop mania.

With great affection.

Mind you, when it launched, I was in my mid-teens and I believed the hype: I thought it really was CGI. Ah, innocence of youth...

Agencies are helpful for the tech and business side, sure, but as the article mentions, the indie scene has exploded. Plenty of creators are putting out high-quality stuff entirely on their own [1].

So, nothing is stopping you from giving it a shot. People are already looking into using VTubing for education, too. [2]

Moreover, these days as more people experiment with real-world integration and interactive setups, the traditional constraints of being a VTuber are really starting to disappear.

[1]: https://www.moguravr.com/pq-vtuber-live-review/ (ja) [2]: https://steam-library-gov.note.jp/n/nd0907ba91174 (ja)

Marketing and promotion, some level of organization involved (coordinating streams with collaborators etc) and merch deals, I think?

Not all of them need it - plenty of full independents out there. But even some small ones group together to hire a manager and form a little "network" I think.

Some VTubers treat it as a gateway into Japanese idol culture. So being part of an agency helps them with access to resources and opportunities for that sort of thing, e.g. voice acting gigs, appearances at events, planning concerts, recording studios, 3d motion tracking studios and brand sponsorships.

I've personally met more women into vtubers as a whole than men. Though, I've met a lot more men who exclusively watch a single vtuber to an almost obsessive degree. This probably has its roots, like most things in the scene, in Japanese idol culture. At least from what I've seen, women are more likely to enjoy the entire experience surrounding the industry instead of just a single idol or group

Also, this completely ignores the small but not insignificant minority of male vtubers

Are VTubers mostly attractive looking female characters?

Alternatively the male porn abuse epidemic.