/vt/ - Virtual Youtubers

I can't find it now, but I recall somebody in the numbers thread calculating that Suisei specifically makes 5000 eurodollars a month from memberships alone based on the number of individual chatters and assuming half of them are ARS which is likely be lowballing it. Quickly calculating based on Playboard, she also makes roughly 68 700 euros a year from Superchats. All of this is before taxes. The real source of income for every Youtuber is ad revenue, and since there is some reason to think Holo viewers watch entire streams (and the majority of Japanese don't have adblockers), despite the corporate cut, those 100k-300k archive views ought to bring a livable income all by themselves at least when complemented by all those 1M view songs (which pay less than stream views). Additionally, there's the Youtube payout and if she has a lot of Premium users watching streams, then she makes a disproportionate amount as the last time I heard about it, Youtube's compensation system is broken favouring heavily long videos watched by Premium users. And people who bought memberships are more likely to be Premium users.

In addition, she has sold over 30 000 copies of her album plus 1000-6000 copies of her singles domestically and we know she hit top 10 on several overseas iTunes', but it's impossible to track the numbers for foreign sales. While modern artists don't really make money by album sales, Hololive seems to operate more like an indie label meaning the Holos do in fact see some profits out of those sales. However, apparently Kiara has mentioned that Gen0 and VSingers have a different contract wherein Hololive pays for their music and Suisei indeed has said that she needs to make a formal request for every new song individually, so it's possible she doesn't actually see that much of the music profits if she doesn't put her own money into it. However, she also seemed to be able to increase the budget for Starry Jet on the fly and mentioned using a year's worth of savings to make Still Still Stellar (but that includes marketing, like the ad truck was paid by herself), so if she does use her own money in addition, then she might also see some of the profits. However, she has confirmed that her MVs get paid by someone else, so Hololive, meaning she doesn't have to pay for those although apparently Champagne Day she drew herself due to not receiving the money, so it's possible she pushes out some songs out of her own pocket.

The real money for artists is in concert tickets and merch for which there are no numbers, but are likely to be a major source of income along with sponsorships. Although somebody compared CDJapan rankings with some publicly available information about the other articles sold and based on that Suisei sold at least 11k plushies at around 35USD, so Hololive and Don Quixote made 385 000$ from overseas Suisei plushie sales alone. And since she is her own mama, she probably gets a double cut from the use of her character, but it's hard to say what a chuuba's cut is for each item and it is likely different Holos at this point have different contracts with different cuts for different things.

>>17170051
I know. I only disable it while doing my number reps, because after the recent outbreak of CCVid Youtube stopped counting my views whenever I had it on.

I saw this webm and I thought about this thread.

>>13158715
Contrail is the best-selling vtuber single and the most viewed is still RIP I think? I think that would be enough numbers relevant to this thread to recommend them.

If you're going to numberfag, use aggregates, not individual stores. The relevant two are Oricon (https://www.oricon.co.jp/rank/)) and Billboard Japan (https://www.billboard-japan.com/charts/).). Oricon is probably slightly more accurate with it's numbers due to accounting for a couple more online stores, but you have to pay if you want to see more than the top 20. You have to pay for full functions of Billboard too, but at least they show the top 100 for most charts. Anyway Oricon publishes their charts on Sunday and Billboard on Wednesday, so the timeframe is slightly different and in case of small fry like Suisei that affects their standing on the charts as they pretty much need the entire week's sales to do well. Ototoy is interesting in that it isn't used by either of those two and chuuba music is fairly dominant on it, but those probably represent VPN sales as it is the easiest place you can get FLACs with a foreign credit card. At any rate, it's just one store and probably doesn't make all that big of a difference in sales.

Currently the only chart Suisei is on is 16th spot on the Heatseekers chart on Billboard, which is intended for finding up and coming artists. She and Inoue are charting there for the third week in a row and are probably dropping off the chart next week from the looks of it. The reason Taku Inoue & Hoshimachi Suisei are on the chart is through the technicality of their joint effort getting counted as a new artist.

>>6132029
Oricon reports sales numbers for its weekly Top 20 and for the three highest on the daily chart. Ghost sold 3,502 copies on release day which got it first place and 6,263 copies during the first week. This week 4,369 downloads was enough to make it to the chart, but neither Bluerose nor Comet made it, although they were 5th and 6th on the daily chart. So they must have sold at least 1895 units less than Ghost during the week. On the other hand, Ghost seems to have gotten really lucky in that the previous major release seems to have been two weeks prior, so the second place was taken by a song with 2,873 downloads and third with 1,939 downloads. So on a similarly slow week it might have been possible for Bluerose and Comet to take first and second, or at least second and third, since based on a song they beat popping up third the next day, they seem to have sold around 2000 units on the first day. Instead they were up against three fairly new Yonezu singles and a BTS single released the previous week.

Oricon seems to be missing at least one digital store: Ototoy, which is the only(?) place you can buy FLACs and ALACs, so it might actually have an impact depending on how many Japanese feel the need to own a lossless copy. It's also dominated by chuuba music: On their yearly chart Next Color Planet is the 2nd, Ghost the 20th, Ghost (Hi-res) 78th and Bluerose/Comet (Hi-res) 83rd. Of course, since it allows foreign credit cards etc. that's where everyone around the world buys their FLACs which no doubt inflates chuuba numbers, but a sale is a sale.

Nevertheless, Oricon is still probably pretty good indicator of the total domestic sales. Although it's weird that Kiseki Knot was 8th on Oricon yet didn't appear on Billboard at all whereas Bluerose did. The difference between the two seems to be that two online stores more report their sales to Oricon, but it's hard to see how two stores could make such a huge difference on Kiseki Knot's ranking. At any case two stores less probably means that both Ghost and Bluerose got a boost to their rankings since it seems that those two stores sell more mainstream stuff and thus more marginal stuff like chuubas do slightly better on Billboard. They also start their week on different days, but both Kiseki Knot and Bluerose should be unaffected unless there was some huge spike on the eve of Coco's graduation that made Kiseki Knot 11th on Oricon daily chart and thus unranked, and too late to count for Billboard, but this seems unlikely given how high it ranked on release day and how well the song below it sold the next day when it bumped up again. Rather it seems like most sales were made on the first day. So something seems fucky about the charts, but I guess the broad strokes are correct.

>>6077632
It actually makes me wonder about stuff like ASMR, zatsudans and karaoke. I definitely leave those on the background while I'm doing something else on a different tab and maybe check in if it sounds like they are actually using their avatar to do something. It's not inconceivable that people are tabbed out for the entire stream and if karaoke monsters like Gura, Suisei, Marine or Toko don't even have a majority of their viewers show up then just imagine the numbers...