The reason VShojo ran out of money is that English vtubing isn't profitable. The reality is that the only sizable market is in Japan. That's why Hololive continues to dominate, and that's why Nijisanji is alive and well despite their EN branch being on life support. VShojo made the mistake of thinking there's more cash to be made in the west than it was actually the case. Japanese otakus are the only audience that matters.

>>102618285 (OP)
Nimi being able to get married through her merch sales disproves this premise.

>>102618285 (OP)
Holy tourist take

>>102618328
Indie vtubing is self-sustainable. But corporations need higher revenue.

>>102618285 (OP)
It is more likely that they blew up the money trying to appease to their creditors. The members were getting money.
Vshoujo received Venture Capital funds, didn't they? There is a time where the VCs have to knock on the doors.

>>102618328
nimi and nimicucks are an exception, she raised a big red flag on her debut hiring caspurr of all people to work with.

>>102618548
It’s probably this. And there’s one post on Twitter that alledges that the company was somehow 2 million in the hole to both talents and loans since 2022.
https://x.com/CL207/status/1947911415651512533
In every way Vshojo sounds like it was doomed to fail. They somehow spent an absurd amount of money despite theoretically having low business expenses, and they only made money off of merch cuts and cuts from sponsorships. It didn’t sound like they once took cuts from superchats or memberships, and combined with the amount of money constantly going into new outfits or redesigns, it sounds like they were never once profitable.

>>102618285 (OP)
This is happening to all major corpos, not just Vshojo.

>>102618285 (OP)
I believe you're actually right, I think that vtubing is a very niche thing and I don't think it will go mainstream, western agencies were given the shot at making it go mainstream and they were unsuccessful, I believe investors will use Vshojo and Niji as proof that global market is not viable which will stunt the growth of vtubing as a whole. In the end it was a passing trend that went faster than the idol trend, at least some people tried and had fun while being part of the move, too bad there was so much abuse surrounding this sector too.

This is true, because western "v-tubing fans" don't actually like v-tubing.
What they want is just more normal youtubers, maybe with an avatar, or maybe without. But they do not want v-tubers.

>>102619060
My nigger vtubers predate the advent of streaming.

>>102618944
you have $500k + potentially more by IronMouse, something in the area of $200k-300k for kson, and if you go on for all the other talents, that'll add up easily towards 2 million

>>102618285 (OP)
English vtubing is profitable so long as your employees don't demand animations, ads, clips, outfits, songs, 3d models, concerts, custom merch, and con appearances with a 0% cut and they just stream

>>102619162
And? Did I mention streaming?

>>102618285 (OP)
>The reason VShojo ran out of money is that English vtubing isn't profitable
>The reality is that the only sizable market is in Japan.
The quite LITERALLY ran out money thanks in part to overspending on trying to captivate a Japanese audience lmao

>>102619348
This is funny, because the JP side actually DID bring in money, unlike the western side.

>>102619189
And that’s also not getting into what they still owe investors too, they aren’t just going to want to break even, they’ll want profits too. When you really think about it, it’s a miracle that people like Ironmouse still tried to keep things going even though the wheels were coming off.

>>102619441
they didnt bring in shit.
it was the JP manager on the spot in a call sticking up for his dead branch, and then kson called him on it saying "WELL THEN WHERE YTHE FUCK IS MY MONEY. WHERE IS MY MONEY"

>>102618285 (OP)
>English vtubing isn't profitable.
god please make it so.

>>102618285 (OP)
>English vtubing isn't profitable for corpos
Both Holo and Phase disprove this

>>102619441
How are you this retarded. The jp manager said the money for the jp branch came from the US office. He just saw money flowing as normal.

>>102619779
To be more accurate (I do speak both JP and EN): He can see the cashflow for JP (in numbers) but the actual cash is controlled by US. The only money JP actually gets is the project budget.

>>102619579
So how would VC work in this case? They didn't really go towards further funding rounds as far as I understand (aren't there usually 2-3 more before exit?)

>>102619441
>"the JP side actually DID bring in money, unlike the western side."
>Kson went from the biggest free agent in vtubing history in 2021 to a fucking 3view in 2025
>The Nazuna experiment was a total failure
>Henya's doing fine
>The NOVA project has been meh and all four members are 3views
I sincerely doubt it

>>102620185
the funny thing is that vshojo fags will say JP was thriving, and then in the next all the post about is "I hope they dont forget about NOVA. Please support NOVA." they know they were dead weight.

the new JP gen was probably where a lot of the money went ffs they were a total sink.

>>102618944
Vshoujo received 11 million years ago from Venture Capital.
Given their business model of promoting "talent freedom" and giving them a lot of revenue, their model failed to get profits and dried up their funds to the point that they had to stop paying the women.

People in the west genuinely despise v-tubers.
They don't like the fact that they're characters, and that the audience is meant to be playing along with it.
They think it's childish and want it all to just be normal content creation.

>>102620118
We don't know further. We know they received VCs but it looks like they failed to get more funds, most likely because the investors realized their business model is a failure.

>>102618285 (OP)
tell me you don't know what you're talking about without telling me you don't know what you're talking about

>>102618285 (OP)
Phase connect made 3 million dollars last year

>>102618285 (OP)
>The reason VShojo ran out of money is that English vtubing isn't profitable

What is Hololive? What is Phase Connect?
It's absolutely profitable but you need to be sensible and not spend above your means. Just because retards go all in on a 'hopefully this will work out' strategy doesn't mean it's not profitable.

>>102618285 (OP)
Good. I hope niji and hololive pulls the life support for their v-tumours.

>>102620501
Source? That's gotta be revenue.

>>102619579
The investors will just have to write it off. Most vc investments will end up as a near total loss. They just need a few that return 10x or even 100x. They don't even need profits, they usually just get someone to buy their stake for 10-100x.

>>102619779
>>102620118
The JP CEO basically claimed that their cashflow was healthy. The problem (if you believe him) wasn't that JP was making a loss (it was profitable, supposedly), it was that HQ was taking their revenue and not paying their expenses.
Eg. Suppose you make 1m and owe 300k to staff and 500k to talents. You have a 200k profit. Now, if you pay the 300k to staff and take the other 700k and never pay the talents... you are profitable but your talents don't get paid. I really want to know what's gunrun's explanation is going to be for all this.

>>102619779
>Both Holo and Phase disprove this
Holo has endless JP money. Phase is making a profit, very true, but they're advancing at snail pace, proven by the fact their visibility is actually still very low compared to the big fish in the pond.

>>102618285 (OP)
Gee, I wonder why EN isn't profitable. Maybe it's because they're a bunch of hags announcing their boyfriends.

>>102618944
Didn't they have a ton of staff too? Phase seems to run leaner and takes a bigger cut

>>102618285 (OP)
Funny how Phasefags start getting defensive the moment this gets brought up, all while using the Holo name.
Yes, Western VTubers are not sustainable. Not at the standard people want when compared to their Japanese counterparts. Entire companies out West can only get venues smaller than what Japanese indies can pull off solo.
That’s the difference in industry scale that doesn’t show up in CCV, subs, or whatever bullshit numbers people here believe.
Anime is ingrained in Japanese life. That is why VTubers can be seen everywhere, from convenience stores to inside trains and even on national TV. This is a level of acceptance that the US market never had a chance of reaching.

>>102620970
>Let me move the goalposts from profitable to something entirely different

>>102620734
According to the latest data (Jun) from vstats
https://blog.vstats.jp/archives/27973361.html
Phase YT watch hours are more than a quarter of of HoloEN, and more if you include twitch.
Of course, the debut buff will gradually fade, so I don't know what it'll settle at.
Also, phase SCs and SE donations tend to be a lot higher per watch hour than holo, so despite not having the event/sponsor revenue of holo, they're probably doing well enough financially that they might have the ability to start expanding faster.

>>102620118
Nobody knows for sure how much money Vshojo had before 2021, but the common number thrown around was 11 million raised in capital by 3 San Fran groups in 2022, according to an article from the site TubeFilter. Presumably they were hoping that Vshojo would attract more popular talents who would raise even more money and flip the concept of current streaming on its head, but it never panned out because it never seemed to have any real idea on how they would make money. And it wasn’t like it the company ever grew to Hololive or Nijisanji levels either, it just stagnated even with tons of advertising and con appearances. Making matters worse was the fact that it sounded like they had paid staff for the Japanese and possibly even their San Francisco HQ, their LinkedIn page states they had 11-50 employees plus a physical location with a Chinatown zip code, who knows how much of that 11 million they burned from 2022 to now.

>>102620734
>they're advancing at snail pace
Phase are only advancing at a snail's pace if you have just been following them for a year.
2021
>debut as 2views with the rest of the small corpos
2022
>grow into low 3views; pippa low 4view in quarter 4. do first convention. 1 playbutton.
2023
>steady low to mid 3views; pippa solid 4view. start doing major collabs with other corpos with pomu and henya and liggers with neuro and filian. added more 3 playbuttons
2024
>high 3views to low 4views; major 3d concerts with big names and sponsorships. many cons many 2d concerts. added more 3 playbuttons
2025
>hit their ceiling on youtube, but boost their twitch presence. bring in established names. 3d concerts at cons, big sponsorships, staying steady while the others crumble. will add 3 more playbuttons by years end

If you have been following Phase for a while, you would know they have already won. They were never supposed to get this far. Small corpos were never supposed to get to where they got to.

>>102619250
>animations
>clips
>outfits
>songs
>3d models
>concerts
Anon I know you're trying to look smart here, but it's pretty well known that the talents were paying for these things. Like even the group collab songs were mostly paid for by Mouse, Matara or Zen.
>custom merch
They'd make a profit off that.
>ads
>con appearances
These ones on the other hand. The JP subway ads were pretty expensive and unnecessary and con shit like the AX stuff in 2023 and 2024 probably cost a fortune between the large booths with giant screens and AX panels are expensive. But also neither of these things were probably demanded by the talents outside of wanting to do meet and greets.

>>102621342

>>102621464
why didnt the 20 other small corpos they started with in 2021 come out? thats right, they didn't make it.

>>102620840
Yup. Phase probably benefits from the weaker Canadian dollar somehow, but taking a bigger cut is 100% helping the company profit. You can’t play the role of “The cool CEO that cares so much for his talents that he only takes small cuts on merch and nothing from supers/memberships” and expect to stay in business at all. Granted Phase isn’t perfect, I hear it takes forever for them to ship merch and setting up their own convention in the future sounds like a fucking money pit, hopefully it’s more like a small gathering or showing up at another con and not a full on massive start up convention.

>>102618285 (OP)
Its not that English vtubing isn't profitable, its that na style streaming isn't profitable for vtubers.

>>102621512
That doesn't mean Phase isn't still a minnow even if fishman knew how to manage his expenses.

>>102621227
>per watch hour
That is such a stupid metric.

>>102621074
>He thinks streaming is where the money is.
This is why Western VTubers are not profitable.

>>102621674
Still the number 2 EN Corpo now.

>>102619779
>Phase
When you are insignificant in the grand scheme of things, you don't matter

>>102622115
>the number 2 EN corpo is so small it proves the point that there's no money in EN vtubing

lmao, this board really is just a hub for phase-shills.

>>102618285 (OP)
>despite their EN branch being on life support.
You fuckign niggers never actually look into what Niji boys bring in. They are selling merch like crazy because NijiEN owns the female viewers. Stop being such spastic self hating homos for once and realize just looking at a guy's fanbase doesn't make you gay; but we already know you are.

>>102620354
Which funny enough it's also why indies who are just an anime girl avatar but act mostly like a normal person and don't try to be some pretend pop idol are becoming more and more popular.

>>102618328
Any 4view independent streamer is easily making it

>>102624936
lel I mean 5view, but 4view is a nice side income outside of corpoworld

Twitchtubing was a mistake.

>>102624987
Oh, being a 4view is enough to make a decent living if you're smart about your deals. But there's a huge difference between personal profit and industry level profit.

>>102618328
Her hudband is rich

>>102624720
Yeah as I said, they hate v-tubing.

>>102626300
3view is enough for a neet on government assistance.

>>102618285 (OP)
According to the JP manager that Kson spoke with during her livestream, money isn't the problem. And it's not like JP had a separate account or anything, it's all under the main US finances. They have the money, and even if they paid the talents it wouldn't be a problem. So that means someone in upper management is purposely not paying contractors like talents and artists even though they could. The question is, why? It's obvious self sabotage of their own corpo, but the motive is unclear. How would they benefit from nuking their own company? My guess is CEO and buddies just want to cash in their private shares and run.

>>102621561
weak local currency can be a massive boon to an international business. It's a permanent +20% bonus to every dollar or euro Pippa and Panko bring in

>>102618285 (OP)
So how do you explain Holomyth?

>>102628123
He said there is no cash flow problem on the JP side since their operating costs and talent payments are still below their profits. But there is no money coming in from the US office, which points to a cash flow issue on the US side. This supports the idea that a Western audience alone cannot sustain a large corporation.
It's funny how people try to turn this into a story of heroes and villains, when it's mostly just about bad business environment.
Turning a profit at a lemonade stand doesn’t mean the market can support a lemonade factory.

>>102618285 (OP)
Fluffy and/or fuzzy hands typed this.

>>102619060
>v-tubing
>v-tubers
What hole did you crawl from?

>>102628690
You're missing the point, they're being ordered not to pay talents and artists even though there is no money issue on the JP side. So if JP had the money to pay, why were they told not to pay for months on end? And whatever that answer is, it's not that hard to think the same thing was happening on the US end. The whole thing reeks of a pump and dump.

>>102622561
>Playstation being a distant second to Nintendo means there's no money in video games

>>102621346
I'm wasn't talking about vshojo as they're more successful without a corpo but more of the small western corpos that pop up

>>102624987
Eh even many mid-high 3 view indies do quite well for themselves, I watch a few of them. All they need is 1 or 2 good oilers and they are set. A subathon each year along with many smaller debuts, like for new models or outfits, and they are set even more.

>>102618285 (OP)
Niji's EN branch is alive *because* it's on life support. Make the cheapest possible merch, cut every corner in events.

>>102622106
No this why you are retarded. Every successful vtubing company STARTS with streaming revenue. VshojoJP was run like a real vtubing company and it was working without EN stealing their money. Now streaming does eventually hit a ceiling and then you make more scaling with other ventures but if you aren’t making money on streaming you don’t have the clout to do those other things
Vshojo tried to skip this step with VC money (even retardedly took 0 streaming rev to incentivize poaches) but the reality is they never had any actual fans. They burned money on bots to make it seem like embedmouse did but she doesn’t. The only actual fans they had were the 2k-5k real viewers Vei and Nyanners had but then they ruined that by getting boyfriends (and Vshojo tried to alter their contracts to get to those fans’ money and then they both left)

>>102620354
They're a shrinking part of the west, and they've mostly been contained to the realm of shitty reality shows and unwatchable dramas.

>>102618457
This isn't NBA, there are mostly just profits. If a vtuber company isn't profitable, someone is pocketing the money.

>>102618285 (OP)
Vshojo fell in the red around the same time Mythic took off

>>102621342
It's impressive how you can always find some /pcg/ faggot in a thread unrelated to his corpo shilling the fuck out of it.
Just buy and Ad or something bro

>>102618368
You're a turtle

>>102619162
No they do not

>>102620503
On the financial documents, Cover still doesn't reveal the different splits between JP/EN/ID, it just tosses all their numbers together and shows that they make a total profit. There is currently no way an outsider can tell whether EN or ID are individually actually making a profit though, or whether it's just JP holding it up. If either EN or ID were actually profitable on their own, I suspect Cover would leap to say so. But they don't so...

>white women
>obsessed with BBC
>white men
>no money
the west has fallen...

western agencies based outside of asia are almost doomed to fail, not counting Mythic. stricter labor laws and higher costs aside, you need relatively popular talents to make a company run based on streaming revenue alone, and almost all western companies struggle to make merch system work

number is also misleading sometimes, 1 sea viewer =/= 1 japan viewer, the buying power is drastically different

>>102633122
>1 sea viewer =/= 1 japan viewer, the buying power is drastically different
this

>>102621561
It depends on if they properly scale the convention. I have friends who run a small game convention every year for their company and they do well enough with about a thousand guests. Granted, they heavily rely on volunteer labor.

>>102618285 (OP)
Probably listened to Reddit and tried shorting Tesla. They lost millions, kek.

>>102618944
VShojo was also known to throw lavish parties at cons and they spent a lot of money in Japan trying to counter program Hololive with marketing.

>>102618285 (OP)
Vshojo wasn't profitable because gunrun was skimming off the top and pocketing it for himself

>>102633122
It's easy to say jp has a bigger buying power when all they need to do is hop into a train for an event or to buy merch.

>>102618285 (OP)
I always thought they will run out of money after Gun Run joined that bogus silicone valley bank (forget the name)

>>102618944
All the talent paid for outfits/designs out of their own pocket, and vshojo didn't take anything from streaming revenue. Vshojo's primary cut came from sponsors/merch/events 3 areas they continuously failed to deliver in.

Old-ish lore but they worked with third companies for merch, but it was early days in vtubing and the companies were small and got overwhelmed by a client the size of vshojo, and a lot of them died. Vshojo brought merch internally and the rate of their merch drops slowed significantly, to the point I haven;t heard of a merch drop for months before this happened.

Sponsors? similar story, somehow they fucked up in this regard too

Events? Yep, never happened.

On top of this with the Offices being based in California and you can bet the upper echelons of the company were paying themselves the good money... you can see how the money probably ran out.

vshojo was just spending money they couldnt afford in order to keep their image up as the "premium" western vtuber corpo. They should have bunkered down and started cutting staff years ago and not piss off their talents into leaving one by one. Also worked on getting their own gens up with contracts where they get their cuts from indies and having ironmouse and friends transfer viewers to them. With proper care and management, vshojo could have been massively successful but instead they just wasted millions on lavish parties and ads that went nowhere.

I always wondered how they could afford to pay for all the support the ex-Niji talents raved about, whilst seemingly taking very low cuts of talent revenue compared to the big Japanese agencies.
Turned out they couldn't.

>>102637026
Yeah, it' strange none of their talents were launched when vshojo didn't have to pay for any of the debut stuff, part of the talent freedom is the talent pays for stream stuff themselves (aka models/assets/etc) their only cost was possibly a lore video?

Maybe they didn't have the resources to do the merch drops or who knows what else, but the merch drops would have probably paid most of the expense of the debut/hiring talent.

>>102618285 (OP)
The reason that Vshojo ran out of money is that Gunrun is a fraud. People thought of him as a successful backpack merchant.
Loutlot on the other hand managed to run his branch with profit.

>>102619250
>they just stream
This. Actual full time streamers make an ungodly amount of money but they're fucking around doing all this garbage pandering to be visible in Tokyo

>>102629250
Small hololarp companies inevitably die, but a few companies have followed Vshojo's (own IP, "talent first") model are doing OK, but none of them are biting off more than they can chew by overextending like Vshojo did.

>>102618285 (OP)
no, anon. vshojo was a mossad money laundering operation.
Verification ňot required.

>>102618328
even normal wageslaves can have enough funds to get married you dingus

>>102628123
My guess is Gunrun funneled money from Vshojo to another business he owns, because that business isnt doing well

>>102635213
And that’s the reason why VTuber companies don’t work in the West. The environment, the culture, and the circumstances there just aren’t suited for growth the way they are in Japan. If all you want is a streamer who does sponsored content, that’s manageable. But once you start demanding concerts, events, and all the extravagant productions you see in Japan, it becomes impossible.

>>102641619
He didn't need to funnel it anywhere. From the outside it always looked like VShojo was spending way more than it brought in, given the much vaunted revenue shares retained by the talent.

>>102644165
I always thought Vshojo was quite lean on the staff side but they actually had 40+ staff members for ~12-18 talents, most of which were expensive positions in CA. Considering the low cuts and the frivolous spending on streamer parties and the like and it's not really surprising they ran out of money.

>>102621464
the top 3 are literal international media conglomerates employing hundreds of people and spending millions on marketing
i wonder how big phase would be if it started with the same level of cash investment

>>102645763
Yeah, Holo got massive investment after the huge success of Ping Pong League, Phase can't compete with that.

>>102646952
it was funded by a billion$ hedge fund and a japenes entertaiment company, latee they signed a deal with Bilibili
you think Yagoo paid for everything himself?
other companies wish they had access to such resources
that + how early they started gave they an impossible head start for others to beat

>>102647479
Yeah, after they'd already had the tough start Phase had to go through too. Maybe fishman should parlay his success so far into investment like Fagoo did. But perhaps he's just not cut out for that.

>>102647697
what a fucking retarded take
by that logic nobody should do shit, its always too late i guess

it's obvious that we need more dramatic measures

>>102619779
Kiara specifically said in a stream that EN is a net negative for the company

Actually substantive catalogpost??
The world has been cleansed of evil.

Or was it merely contained in the body of this confederacy?
Did the devil died with vshojo or did it disperse its seeds of cruelty as their cronies detach from their host?

>>102642322
just the difference in culture and the size of the market is huge. in Japan, you can go into a convenience store and buy a bag of chips with a vtuber on it. try that kind of sponsorship integration in the US. put ironmouse in buccee's

>>102618328
Kek

>>102636908
So the money they owed the talents came from these three, right?

>>102618285 (OP)
Its profitable if you don't spend beyond your means and don't use a business model that relies on constant infusion of venture capital.