VTubing: How a Japanese Phenomenon Is Going Worldwide

https://www.tokyodev.com/articles/vtubing-how-a-japanese-phenomenon-is-going-worldwide

35•pwim•7h ago

Comments

krige•2h ago

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.

rmunn•2h ago

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

flobosg•46m ago

According to the article metadata:

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

valorzard•1h ago

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.

maeln•1h ago

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.

krige•50m ago

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 merchandasing, but that's a different can of worms.

gkanai•2h ago

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.

rmunn•2h ago

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.

ta8903•1h ago

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

ben_w•1h ago

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.

perching_aix•2h ago

*Went worldwide, half a decade ago.

yieldcrv•1h ago

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

teleforce•1h ago

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

ledoge•21m ago

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.

bakugo•16m ago

The latest and greatest method of exploiting and monetizing the male loneliness epidemic.

AlecSchueler•8m ago

Alternatively the male porn abuse epidemic.

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