alt Hacker NewsThat'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.
Replies
It quotes figures from Q1 of 2026, so it was definitely published this year.
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.
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.