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.

  "datePublished":"2026-07-16T08:18:37+09:00"

Loneliness, as far as I can tell.

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 also wondered this before I ever saw any. There is a gradient from someone streaming with no cam, then a non-human vtuber, then human vtuber and finally a real human.

The simplest answer is probably that we all have our likes and dislikes, but personally for me I fall inbetween the non-human and vtuber section. If they stream permanently as e.g. a fish I find it too odd, whereas apparently my brain is perfectly happy seeing any kind of expressive humanoid that I can link to the speaking person.

If they have no cam then its just a voice over which feels too impersonal for the streaming space, which I don't like.

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

Same reason people watch any streamers; they either enjoy the streamer's personality, the games they play, or both.

For a lot of people, it's basically like watching one of your friends play a game you enjoy, and a way to become part of a community of others interested in the same thing.

Meanwhile in other cases it's a matter of just not having the time/energy/skill to play the games they're covering, but being interested in seeing how they pan out. For example, I often watch people play extremely difficult mods of games like Super Mario World, Super Mario 64 and New Super Mario Bros Wii. Yes, I could easily go ahead and do the same thing, and I do play mods of those games which are a lot easier...

But I find a good player's experience of these games fun to watch, and don't feel like spending hours on every level trying to match that myself.

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.

Oh I can answer this! I watch quite a lot of VTubers, almost all of them from the Hololive brand and a few indies. I don't watch regular streamers anymore.

- The most succinct way I can describe it is it has some overlap with the appeal of the anime/manga subculture in the West. Imagine a character in a manga has a "soul" imbued in them and they talk for hours on YouTube about a brand of ketchup they like and all the specific reasons why they like that brand. Depending on the topic, it's hard for some to get enough of that sort of thing. You feel a sense of (parasocial) connection to the streamer as you get to learn more about them in these hyperspecific ways over the years, in a way that a static, deliberately constructed medium such as anime or manga cannot express. Accumulated personal knowledge of the streamer is the social currency of VTuber fans, and by extension fans of real-life idols, as it can only be gained by watching and following them for a long time. I would recommend the book Idols and Celebrity in Japanese Media Culture for an academic perspective of real-life idols, since many of the concepts overlap with Japanese corporate VTubers.

- Many anime/manga franchises and brands like Vocaloid have historically appealed to a need of emotional connection in the past with things like character goods, but VTubers interact directly with their audience so the effect is much more pronounced. It is like those characters are actually speaking to you for once (though usually they aren't speaking to anyone in particular). Plus they talk about their own favorite anime, manga and games. This is very appealing to some.

- I don't know about regular streamers but with VTubers it's a surprisingly social activity. People are encouraged to create art and post it on the hashtags of each streamer, so watching streams is a wellspring of motivation for creative types. A lot of the things depicted in that art would be unusual or weird if they were drawn for real-life streamers IMO, but in the VTubing sphere it is seen differently. I would say the vast majority of VTubers aren't insulted if you post something explicit of them so long as you keep it off of the offical channels. They will just ignore it and carry on. There is something to be said about this in a culture that some might say is becoming more and more puritanical.

- The fan communities are niche but very devoted. Being a fan gives you a sense of identity. Meeting with a fan that watches the same streamer instantly gives us a lot things to talk about. Multiple people I met at in person events describe the community as "home" to them, maybe same as football fans are with a favorite team. People wear the liveries of their favorite streamer or cosplay and group together for large gatherings or do online fan activities. I'm not aware of an equivalent for someone like Asmongold!

- In Hololive's case, it is a truly apolitical streaming experience, I believe one of the few that exists with their level of popularity. I watch VTubers to shut out the chaos and cynicism of the rest of the world. You can depend on Hololive for this anti-cynicism bubble because they have stringent rules that politics or inflammatory topics are off-limits. But in addition, the VTubers themselves are just fun to watch. Reading the interactions they have with each other online is one of the few times I get the "old web" feeling that has mostly vanished from modern social media. It is a precious feeling and I end up wanting to protect and cultivate it.

- With Hololive in particular, it's hard to describe but after watching for a while you get a "feeling" for what brand identity the management is trying to build, and that identity appeals to me. It is built on some level of restrictions on topics/activities (permission to steam certain games being one example) but the trade-off is the amount of resources thrown at each VTuber means they are freer to be themselves within those limitations and they don't have to act outrageous all the time to get attention, since the company takes care of promotions and reach. This one is big for me. I disagree with the article's notion that "eccentric", "expressive" and "weirder" necessarily contributes to a more appealing stream environment. A lot of those things mean being loud to stand out in the overcrowded market if you're an indie, unless you have a pre-existing fanbase.

- Being a fan gives me an excuse to feel like a child again, without any social repercussions. I think this is common to a lot of hobbies. I can carry around a plushie of a VTuber I like in public and people have randomly come up to me an said "oh! Is that ______?" and we can hold a sustained conversation for like half an hour.

Wanting a sense of togetherness is why I keep returning. True, it is an experience based on a false sense of connection with the streamer, but I have made a lot of real friends in the hobby and we talk regularly.

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

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

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.

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.

> 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...

LOL, yeah I couldn't figure it out back then.

I don't understand the draw of video anything at all; I never have. I can read information 100x faster than a video can provide and I just cannot possibly understand why anyone would want to sit through a 45 minute YouTube video that would have taken 1.5 pages of text.

That said, I'm not at all opposed to OTHERS getting the information in the delivery method they prefer. Great; good for you. But! I don't want to see written word be entirely replaced by video. And, before you ask: no; a transcript of the script is not what I want either.

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?

Hey buddy, you ok there?

Alternatively the male porn abuse epidemic.