That's a bit... late to the party. I can't find when the article was published, but the phenomenon "went worldwide" several years ago by the means of COVID. These days the vtubing as an industry is in a somewhat stable state, if not a possible decline, going by viewership hours over the same period. Many big EN and JP names have already retired too.
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.
It's not 2018 anymore, so that's not quite true. By now free models have been there forever, and indies have been using them for as long. I mean, Filian has already been using one over 4 years ago.
Which caused some problems with merchandising, but that's a different can of worms.
It's a complex/murky matter with lots of allegations in every direction that's hard to summarize properly.
The absolute barest bone / neutral summary is that Filian is very popular (3.2 mil subs on yt, 1.3 mil subs on twitch, although she may be retiring currently, or is doing an extensive publicity stunt as her channels and socials are wiped clean). Two years ago, the model's creator announced [0] that Good Smile is making a nendo based off his model for an unnamed vtuber, and that they were not informed beforehand, let alone credited or compensated. They were trying to contact Good Smile and said vtuber to resolve the matter. After a few days Jingo posted an extensive message [1] that the situation was resolved and the parties are cooperating, further noting, among other things, that "free to use in VRchat" does not mean "free to do anything without any credit".
Note that this was not the first time Filian made merch off this model, and it was not stated clearly why Jingo took steps only at that point. Possibly because they never heard about Filian and only realized what's going on since Good Smile is a well known Japanese company.
that fillian controversy gives me flashbacks.... suprisingly little of that controversy seems to have survived, even though its only been 2 years.
this one is the only thing i could scrounge up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsXOyo1BM6Y - but always take what he says with a barrel of salt, he'S more trying to drum up drama then actually portrait things truthfully
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 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.
Strange omission to talk about the general anti-AI sentiment, while not mentioning that the #3 most-watched English VTuber (Neuro-sama) is an LLM – who is actually widely accepted as a "good" use of AI by other VTubers and viewers.
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.
It's certainly possible someone could fake something like that for views, but I'm curious what you consider to be the tells that it's no longer an LLM behind the wheel?
Maybe it's LLM and human actor splitting work, but she looks too natural, too fast and too error-free to be LLM based since too long ago. Just their dictation -> thinking -> TTS loop is too fast to be LLM. Context awareness and character adherence is too perfect as well.
The first time I encountered VTubing, I thought the point was just to hide your face, for various reasons. Being sensitive about your looks, not wanting to attract stalkers, whatever. But there's apparently a lot more to it; I was surprised.
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.
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.
Maybe they do get it, but are choosing to lean more into the authenticity angle. An art form, a medium, evolves when new cultures and sub-cultures take it up and add their own stuff, both the creator and the audience.
Maybe from their perspective they're correctly doing it their way, instead of, as in your perspective, failing to do it your way.
You might prefer things to be that way, but it's important to remember that's an absurd expectation. Especially in the west with how frequently vtubers graduate and show up under a different name. Even hololive JP, who push the entire persona thing very hard, have to periodically break immersion and remind fans that there are real people behind the avatar.
The "different persona" stuff is responsible for some of the most serious abuses the industry has surfaced, and the increasing treatment of VTubing as an avatar is a direct consequence of that.
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'm not particularly into VTubing (not a fan of social streaming or the japanese style), but i find the tech and creativity amazing. I'm very into mocap and started building an experimental facial capture system, which overlaps a lot with the VTubing concept, but using different protocols (most VTubing models/solutions uses VMC) and more varied custom cartoon models.
If you are into the tech behind mocap this community is a fun place to explore.
The stock prices are not great all things considered- I think that the vtuber audience needs something new/different to broaden beyond it's current market base AND I think investors would rather put money into AI related stocks than IP/vtuber related stocks.
The VTuber phenomenon is often framed as escape hatch for streamers who do not prefer to show faces; IMO, it couldn't have worked if audiences found it disappointing - the audiences must prefer the presenter hiding their face than prominently displaying it. I think that's more noteworthy than the person behind it opting to hide their faces.
I think this can be very fun, practical amd enjoyable approach for teaching and sharing online techical contents especially presenting to the younger generations, but focusing on the non-AI generated contents.
It can be a very good trade-off between the sloppy AI and the boring lectures.
I can see myself doing this in the future, but why they need agents for VTubing, is it because of VTubing platform, marketing/promotion or payment?
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.
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
This is a very tired insult/joke outsiders throw around about vtubing (though I don't get the impression that you had that intention). It's somewhat ridiculous, vtubers stream very often and voice changers tend to be pretty obvious. There are some men who use female avatars, but it isn't common.
It's also kinda misogynistic, plenty of women enjoy anime culture. Many prominent artists for vtuber models are also women (and occasionally vtubers themselves). To the level that calling the model artist "mama" and the model rigger "papa" is a common trope.
lol the assumptions remind me of the late 90s and early 2000s
where routine benign things such as playing an offline game with a character that didn’t look like you and a different gender was considered to mean something it didn’t, outside of the gaming community
That's a bit... late to the party. I can't find when the article was published, but the phenomenon "went worldwide" several years ago by the means of COVID. These days the vtubing as an industry is in a somewhat stable state, if not a possible decline, going by viewership hours over the same period. Many big EN and JP names have already retired too.
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.
Nah weaboos and (us) furries been doing it for ages + not necessarily expensive at all, can use a webcam for basic ones for ages now.
It's not 2018 anymore, so that's not quite true. By now free models have been there forever, and indies have been using them for as long. I mean, Filian has already been using one over 4 years ago.
Which caused some problems with merchandising, but that's a different can of worms.
> Which caused some problems with merchandising, but that's a different can of worms.
Can you expand on this? Are they not able to sell merch since they don't "own" their design?
How popular are they? Have they considered buying the model from the authors?
It's a complex/murky matter with lots of allegations in every direction that's hard to summarize properly.
The absolute barest bone / neutral summary is that Filian is very popular (3.2 mil subs on yt, 1.3 mil subs on twitch, although she may be retiring currently, or is doing an extensive publicity stunt as her channels and socials are wiped clean). Two years ago, the model's creator announced [0] that Good Smile is making a nendo based off his model for an unnamed vtuber, and that they were not informed beforehand, let alone credited or compensated. They were trying to contact Good Smile and said vtuber to resolve the matter. After a few days Jingo posted an extensive message [1] that the situation was resolved and the parties are cooperating, further noting, among other things, that "free to use in VRchat" does not mean "free to do anything without any credit".
Note that this was not the first time Filian made merch off this model, and it was not stated clearly why Jingo took steps only at that point. Possibly because they never heard about Filian and only realized what's going on since Good Smile is a well known Japanese company.
[0] https://x.com/jingo_1016/status/1809101855655670159
[1] https://x.com/jingo_1016/status/1809811423125729396
that fillian controversy gives me flashbacks.... suprisingly little of that controversy seems to have survived, even though its only been 2 years.
this one is the only thing i could scrounge up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsXOyo1BM6Y - but always take what he says with a barrel of salt, he'S more trying to drum up drama then actually portrait things truthfully
Is this AI? That was the case like 5 years ago. Every big western vtuber right now started out as an indie using free models.
> 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.
According to the article metadata:
https://imgflip.com/i/ax3s0h
The last section should have been titled “Why Do People Watch It?” because I finished the article still wondering.
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.
Strange omission to talk about the general anti-AI sentiment, while not mentioning that the #3 most-watched English VTuber (Neuro-sama) is an LLM – who is actually widely accepted as a "good" use of AI by other VTubers and viewers.
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.
It's certainly possible someone could fake something like that for views, but I'm curious what you consider to be the tells that it's no longer an LLM behind the wheel?
Maybe it's LLM and human actor splitting work, but she looks too natural, too fast and too error-free to be LLM based since too long ago. Just their dictation -> thinking -> TTS loop is too fast to be LLM. Context awareness and character adherence is too perfect as well.
Never seen Taalas?
Let alone a decent sized model on a couple 4090s or similar, pretty gud t/s to churn out tts/stt/response/control model actions and emotes.
Do humans often repeat JSON spewed by integrations? It’s still very much a LLM.
The first time I encountered VTubing, I thought the point was just to hide your face, for various reasons. Being sensitive about your looks, not wanting to attract stalkers, whatever. But there's apparently a lot more to it; I was surprised.
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.
Maybe they do get it, but are choosing to lean more into the authenticity angle. An art form, a medium, evolves when new cultures and sub-cultures take it up and add their own stuff, both the creator and the audience.
Maybe from their perspective they're correctly doing it their way, instead of, as in your perspective, failing to do it your way.
You might prefer things to be that way, but it's important to remember that's an absurd expectation. Especially in the west with how frequently vtubers graduate and show up under a different name. Even hololive JP, who push the entire persona thing very hard, have to periodically break immersion and remind fans that there are real people behind the avatar.
The "different persona" stuff is responsible for some of the most serious abuses the industry has surfaced, and the increasing treatment of VTubing as an avatar is a direct consequence of that.
Supposed by whom?
Japanese idol culture and the first few vtubers, iirc
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'm not particularly into VTubing (not a fan of social streaming or the japanese style), but i find the tech and creativity amazing. I'm very into mocap and started building an experimental facial capture system, which overlaps a lot with the VTubing concept, but using different protocols (most VTubing models/solutions uses VMC) and more varied custom cartoon models.
If you are into the tech behind mocap this community is a fun place to explore.
The two largest vtuber agencies/companies are publicly traded in Japan.
https://finance.yahoo.co.jp/quote/5253.T?term=2y
https://finance.yahoo.co.jp/quote/5032.T?term=2y
The stock prices are not great all things considered- I think that the vtuber audience needs something new/different to broaden beyond it's current market base AND I think investors would rather put money into AI related stocks than IP/vtuber related stocks.
> 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.
The VTuber phenomenon is often framed as escape hatch for streamers who do not prefer to show faces; IMO, it couldn't have worked if audiences found it disappointing - the audiences must prefer the presenter hiding their face than prominently displaying it. I think that's more noteworthy than the person behind it opting to hide their faces.
Anyone remember Max Headroom?
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...
I think this can be very fun, practical amd enjoyable approach for teaching and sharing online techical contents especially presenting to the younger generations, but focusing on the non-AI generated contents.
It can be a very good trade-off between the sloppy AI and the boring lectures.
I can see myself doing this in the future, but why they need agents for VTubing, is it because of VTubing platform, marketing/promotion or payment?
Obligatory VTuber Wikipedia entry [1].
[1] VTuber:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VTuber
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.
The latest and greatest method of exploiting and monetizing the male loneliness epidemic.
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?
The extreme majority, yeah. The guys doing it are less popular, although they also have a kind of "anime husband" aesthetic.
> The guys doing it are less popular
I get the impression that a lot of the female characters are dudes.
This is a very tired insult/joke outsiders throw around about vtubing (though I don't get the impression that you had that intention). It's somewhat ridiculous, vtubers stream very often and voice changers tend to be pretty obvious. There are some men who use female avatars, but it isn't common.
It's also kinda misogynistic, plenty of women enjoy anime culture. Many prominent artists for vtuber models are also women (and occasionally vtubers themselves). To the level that calling the model artist "mama" and the model rigger "papa" is a common trope.
That used to be the case, but dudes through a voice changer are quite rare now.
It's quite rare for that to be the case, at least in the English speaking side of the Vtubing world. I can really only think of one example.
Attractive looking cartoon characters, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Alternatively the male porn abuse epidemic.
lol the assumptions remind me of the late 90s and early 2000s
where routine benign things such as playing an offline game with a character that didn’t look like you and a different gender was considered to mean something it didn’t, outside of the gaming community
*Went worldwide, half a decade ago.
aka digital twining