The conception of vtubers as we understand them today (it’s December 2020 as I write this) only really came about starting in 2018. That was when the first generation Hololive livers came into being following Generation “0” and when Nijisanji launched as well.
In the past I often thought of Hololive and Nijisanji as direct competitors, probably because they’re the two currently active agencies that operate at a comparable level of scale and mainstream popularity. However these days I’m not so convinced that that’s the case. When you dig deeper into the content both brands produce and the livers they have on their rosters it becomes clear that many aspects of their strategies are fundamentally different, even as business structure might be quite similar. Livers from both agencies have collaborated with each other frequently, which would definitely not be the case if their companies viewed each other as direct competitors.
I also get the sense, though there’s pretty much no way to confirm it outside of customer surveys, that there’s a ton of overlap in people who subscribe to Hololive and those who subscribe to Nijisanji livers. When I worked for a credit/personal finance app company one thing I learned early on was that the vast majority of the app’s users were also using at least one of our direct competitors, if not all of them. If the base product is free and the means of getting it are easy then why not sign up for a bunch of them and see which one works best? It’s worthwhile to keep in mind when it comes to free online consumer products like credit score apps and vtubers unless/until one clearly has some sort of blatant substantive advantage versus the rest most people will tend to dabble in all of them.
In light of that mismatch I got interested in the disparity between the two agencies. Despite starting right around the same time Cover has a clear lead in subscriptions. As of December of 2020 four of Hololive’s vtubers have more than a million YouTube subscribers, whereas Tsukino Mito, Nijisanji’s flagship liver and their most popular, has around 652,000 subscribers. Based on a content analysis of the most popular livers on both agencies there arguably isn’t any disparity in terms of quality, abundance, or audio-video fidelity of content, so what is it?
I did a little bit of digging into the histories (insofar as two years of business operations can be called history) of both agencies and observed the ways in which they appear or don’t appear on YouTube and put together a few observations for why Hololive has come out ahead in terms of overall popularity, especially in English-speaking markets. Most of these are conjecture, but I tried to draw as much as I could from firsthand observation as well as this amazingly in-depth Japanese article on the early divergence between the two agencies and how Hololive came to pull ahead.
Abundance of translated clips
A significant amount of the growth Japanese vtubers have enjoyed this year came from outside Japan. While actual sub numbers by geo aren’t publicly available the launch of Hololive EN and a new generation of Hololive ID this year indicate Cover is aware of the growth potential of the English-speaking market. This must be especially true in the wake of the company pulling out of its comparatively unsuccessful Chinese market efforts.
Why has Hololive enjoyed such a boost from overseas English-speaking markets? The simple answer is that there’s been way more Hololive content translated into English up on YouTube. A sprawling network of amateur translators and video editors have been isolating and clipping the best bits of Hololive, quickly becoming the primary means through which English speakers are becoming acquainted not just with Hololive but vtubers in general.
While a large amount of Nijisanji material is also getting translated now, little to any of it has reached the level of notoriety some Hololive clips, like the now-legendary Sakura Miko clip above, have. Why is that? Some of the following points might be potential reasons.
Idol Content vs. Eclectic Content
Cover Corp CEO YAGOO has always maintained that Hololive and Holostars are part of the traditional Japanese idol model of polished multi-talented stars who can generate content based off of their various skill sets, but also be monetized through leveraging their influencer status to get sponsorship deals and advertising appearances. While more recent generations have branched out in other directions, becoming way more self-aware and ironic in general, the idol conceit has never gone away.
Nijisanji’s roster has its fair share of singers and performers doing “live” concerts and releasing albums and singles, but I think it’s fair to say that their livers have never presented as idols in any significant way. Compare Nijisanji’s founding member, Tsukino Mito, to Hololive’s founding member, Tokino Sora. Whereas Sora’s design and demeanor are the platonic ideal of a J-pop idol, Mito is characterized as a prim high school class president type. Mito’s model student image is also almost immediately undercut by her loopy eccentricity and tendency to spiral off into impressive stream-of-consciousness anecdotes or weird and funny art experiments like the time she reviewed videos sent to her by a supposed “stalker” wearing a Tsukino Mito kigurumi cosplay.
Mito’s style and general sense of humor are a decent encapsulation of the Nijisanji approach to content. While a core part of Hololive’s hook is the conceit that these are polished anime idols whose eccentricities are often presented like ironic breaking of character, Nijisanji’s eccentricity is front and center. Nijisanji livers tend to speak in more natural intonations than the extreme idol-y affect of many Hololivers too. This can lead to an impression that Nijisanji is a stable full of deadpan utter weirdos, which is refreshing for people looking for something fresh, but for those perhaps introduced to the format through Kizuna Ai and/or Hololive clips, the slow burn weirdness of Nijisanji can be jarring.
Emphasis on group content
An immediate distinction one notices when digging into Nijisanji content is the abundance of content with several livers involved. When combined with full 3D models this usually results in some of the best weird humor the agency has to offer.
With more than a hundred livers on its roster Nijisanji boasts a multitude of groupings of its livers, many of which have overlapping memberships. These groups collaborate with each other frequently and often have complex lore and backstory, such as Dokuzuhonsha, a four-liver group that roleplays a nuclear family with two members as the housewife and salaryman husband and the other two as their two children. They will do viewer Q&As, acting skits in full 3D, and multiplayer videogames all with the conceit that they’re a pseudo-functional family.
While this approach to content can be very rewarding and capitalizes on the chemistry between different performers, hundreds of livers simply makes it hard to keep track and quickly pinpoint a favorite solo talent. It can also be imposing to a newcomer unfamiliar with the lore and less immediately appealing or clippable than something like Sakura Miko having another heated gamer moment in Grand Theft Auto 5.
Collaborations flow towards Hololive
As mentioned in the intro Hololive and Nijisanji livers aren’t above doing collab streams with each other and having been doing so since the very beginning. However the Note article linked above points out that the benefits of such collaborations may not be equally distributed.
The article alleges that in most cases new subscriber growth flows towards the Hololive participant(s) almost exclusively without a reciprocal effect for Nijisanji. Part of that is allegedly the frequent rate at which these collabs are hosted on the Hololive member’s account, which would favor the Hololiver as users will always be more inclined to do a single-screen interaction like a subscription -- if they aren’t subscribed already -- on the URL they’re already on rather than click through the video description or do a manual search afterwards to find the other liver’s account and subscribe to that too. I don’t have an easy method of validating that assertion though, so don’t take it as gospel truth.
Below is an example of Hololive/Nijisanji collabs all hosted on the Hololiver’s account.
Female bias
No this isn’t where the newsletter becomes a redpill tract. The fact of the matter is that Cover keeps its male and female livers separate in Holostars and Hololive respectively, while Nijisanji has from the very beginning made no gender delineation. (especially after the folding of the Gamers and SEEDs spinoffs into the main fold after a big flattening of the streamer groups at the end of 2018)
It can be argued that Nijisanji’s penchant for gender diverse collabs and liver groupings has hindered some of its growth potential. Vtuber viewer demographics appear to still be male dominated, and the traditional rules of the moé mode of consumption dictate that the female object of moé sentiment should never be placed in a presence of a male and thus dispel the viewer’s fantasy of being the only man in their virtual life.
It might even be the case that Hololive is well aware of this phenomenon and used it to its advantage. It’s been noted that a number of Hololivers have frequently collabed with male Nijisanji livers in the past and enjoyed subscriber boosts from them that were not reciprocal on the other side -- which is to be expected if the majority of vtuber fans are male and we assume that the majority of male fans are more interested in following female livers. If we conversely assume that female fans are more likely to follow male livers then it follows that the female Hololiver will still see the greater amount of subscriber growth as the overall n of viewers will have been far more male than female -- Natsuiro Matsuri’s subscriber demographics will have been majority female, whereas Joe Rikiichi’s will have been close to male-female parity at best.