Food looks better in anime than real life. And houses in anime looks way more beautiful and cleaner than real houses. Same applied to vtubers avatar. They are always adorable without the flaws that 3D human have. I watch vtubers because they're cute and funny. And as you learn more about them, you will start to appreciate all of their effort and hardship to get to their current popularity. Sakura Miko. She's funny as hell. Her broken english and ridiculous decision making whenever she played games always cracks me up. But it hasn't always been like that. She was an independent vtuber project under a company before joining hololive. But the project failed. She isn't that popular early on and even after joining hololive she doesn't get that much attention. She almost gave up until one of her viewers recommend her to play GTA 5 and then her gameplay went viral. Now there's hololive EN that gain massive amount of popularity with Gawr Gura reaching 1 mil subs in just couple of months. They have the usual vtuber charm but now they speak english making it accessable to every english speaking viewers. I think vtubers will keep on growing but then there's too many of them and only limited amount of fans. So some of them will get buried eventually. The OGs channel are already dying. Kizuna Ai struggle to even get to 30k views per video now when she easily get million views per video previously. Kaguya Luna channel pretty much dead now. And so does Hinata channel which couldn't event get to 10k views each video.
Are you this person? Spoiler If anyone gets this reference, please contact me. I would like some comrades...
I generally like watching Vtuber streams to have as background noise for when I'm doing work. It also helps with my Japanese learning. I also never watched streams before getting into Vtubers but somehow Vtubers made me willing to watch live streams. I also think of another appeal is giving life to your waifu, in a way now, you're waifu actually exists now and isn't a pre-scripted moving png. She's now a moving png with an actual personality. On a side note I also started streaming as a Vtuber but I'm not going to share my channel since I don't want anyone drawing connections to that channel and somehow doxxing me if that's even possible. After becoming a Vtuber, I can also say that being a Vtuber is a lot more fun than being a regular streamer (at least to me). I actually tried regular streaming before and it was boring, but taking on the character you're pretending to be and acting like him and slowly letting your audience know more about your lore is pretty fun to do. (In a way you can think of it as escapism for me. Forgetting about your irl stuff and focusing on being that character for an hour or two a day is pretty stress relieving to me.)
I used to watch streamers for games I play solely for the commentary even if they didn't show anything (in terms of avatars). I'm particular fond of streamers that do Pokemon walkthroughs and way back when we had quite a lot of them. Vtubers occupy a similar niche for me, where I can watch something entertaining and experience a game second-hand either because 1) I don't own the game or 2) the streamer has a personality that makes listening to them entertaining For hololive specifically...the community is a meme factory which probably contributes to a lot of people's enjoyments, and the Vtubers themselves are largely charismatic or just straight up funny. It's really about finding someone whose vibe you like. I'm a fan of some of the JP branch of hololive (Suisei and Okayu), primarily those who do musical covers because even though I can't understand their regular streams, I know the songs they sing from anime/movies/etc. so I can still enjoy it. I'd recommend just checking out clips if you want to get into it... As for other agencies? Hololive and Nijisanji are the big ones, but there are independent Vtubers like Artemis of the Blue, Ironmouse, Pikamee, and many, many others. Along with a few smaller companies.
From what I can tell, I think people watch VTubers for their personality. The avatar is just a bonus, the equivalent of a facecam. Content-wise it’s not much different, it’s just that VTubers have a persona they need to enforce more than normal YouTubers. I only watch Suisei on occasion because her psychopath moments are really amusing. I think that VTubers are gonna be a long-running trend based on the current popularity of them, and anime in general is always gonna be a constant which helps. Nijisanji is another popular company I think
Sorry, I don't know who that is... are they a proper human slave of cats? All I got with an image search is that is from some VN. I don't know... those tend to be a bit... slow for my taste... unless..
People watch vtubers for different things. Every vtubers have different qualities and interests. You cannot really say you don't find vtubers interesting after seeing a few clips. I personally watch Ina because I like her relaxing and chill streaming in the background while I'm doing other stuff. I also watch some of others vtubers for some laught or I find very interesting what they are doing and there are vtubers that I don't enjoy watch because I don't like their personality. It's all about preferences and find the one that you enjoy. It's basically the same as any other form of entertainment. You watched them for making your days more enjoyable. I don't think people will enjoy them as much without their avatar persona. Not because it's not longer anime. Mostly because I feel that with the avatar, they are more free to be themself without being judged. It's interesting that the thing that made vtubers explode in the west was them breaking the personality they was supposed to do. Most still follow that idol/fake personality but it's not strict as the idols. It's ironical that you can feel a fake avatar more honest than a real person. That really help for people to connect with them. Interesting it also work as wall. People don't need to take them too seriously. Because you cannot really know who is behind that avatar persona. Vtubers was already a intergral part of youtube. It was just as not as popular in the west. I don't think it's going to die. At worst a good portion of people will stop watching them but I hardly doubt they will stop getting new blood. Ninjisanji was in the west before Hololive. They just didn't have as much as big boom. There are also many small company with decent size vtubers and indipendent vtubers. Also let's don't forget there are male vtubers. They aren't as popular for obvious reason but that doesn't mean you cannot enjoy them if you want to try something different.
She's currently back on the rise, since she's doing a lot of collaborations all of the sudden, and has become more of a down to earth character than before. Plus there was that whole thing where people thought her voice actress was retiring, even though that was a simple misunderstanding that is currently being fixed. It's a good example of what the anti's can pull off.
People still made drama for a reason or another. Don't know the previous years, but this year I saw a lot of drama everywhere. Either for content, attention or malicious intention.
Don't know about the rest because it's impossible to follow everyone but Pikamee isn't independent. She is under VOMS project with other two vtubers. They follow the same style of avatar.
I'm unironically in it for the memes. No I'm not talking about cringe reddit memes I'm talking about the memes. The fucking autism and degeneracy is glorious.
Are you perhaps speaking of Virtual Noja Loli Kitsunemusume Youtuber Ojisan? They retired from vtubing since they are more on the tech side.
I watch vtubers for many reasons, their songs aside (as not all vtubers got good songs) I like watching vtubers for comedy, silly as it is for some people but comedy is still comedy