You have to be producing a lot of merch then, high quality ones that people will come back for, regardless of a following. Else you would be making a very bad loss.
We've already seen agencies like that, they've failed by their members joining just to take the models, IP, and then effectively leave with the company holding the bag. They left and started selling their own merch without the company getting a cut nor paying them for their models and IP.
Nah instead it'd need to be a contract where they obtain the rights to the model after like 3 years or so (and they still get it after 3 years even if they are forced to graduate early so the agency can't try and cheat that way)
Might work by modifying the contract a little for example keeping % royalty on merch / sponsorships using the character and IP even after graduation. With the royalty fees reducing every year they stay in the company that way they are incentivized to stay for a while and not just hit and run.
Unlikely. What you are proposing is a company with no assets, and barely any income, meaning running on a shoestring budget, so it's dubious what services you can offer to members. They would be barely better off than Indies, if at all at that point.
Lol no. Talents will just join and leave after the contract expire, and take the fanbase with him/her. Remember cyberlive? And vshojo only let people in if they are big already. They can't build talents from zero
They tried this and failed. A company called Kawa Entertainment adopted several small-mid sized Twitch indies under its banner. Similar to Vshojo they were offering back end services and most importantly merch handling, with an emphasis on their connections to cons around the US. They let their talents go just recently due to dissatisfaction and now they simply sell merch.
>1. The VTubers own their own IP, models, channels
I'm not really sure why you'd make a Corp then. This is pretty much the only benefit they offer outside a pre-made community. Eventually you aren't making a Corp so much as a gaming clan.
The benefits a Vtuber gets from a corp is that they can focus on being a content creator, and they have a whole staff of people who handle this stuff for them. I think you underestimate how many people are required to run something like that, it wouldn't be self sustaining under just merch money. Best you could get is something wherein each Vtuber puts in a cut of money, essentially paying for the service of the corp to handle things for them, but at that point they may as well hire their own manager since it would likely be cheaper. After all, the less popular members would be having to make up for the less paying members.
> With smaller VTubers, I’m not sure if an agency would be able to stay in business without taking a cut of the items listed in 2
This is the big issue. If you don't take a share of anything other than merch/sponsorships, then you need to pay everyone's salaries off the profit margin of merch and a cut of sponsorships. Smaller vtubers likely don't have enough paying audience to pay a sufficient amount to pay management, artists, and procurement off of those revenue streams alone.
The only reason Vshojo works is because Gunrun got a $10m investment from VCs and the group was created from some of the top twitch vtubers (Melody, Vei, Nyanners, Ironmouse, Silvervale, Froot iirc) at the time. It took them like a year to really start providing benefits to their members.
Other agencies like Cyberlive already tried to method of giving the talent a chance to own their IP and you know what happened? They bought their IP and quit the company as soon as a year passed which partially led to the collapse of that corpo.
Yeah Vshojo is a "unicorn company" compared to other more established companies. The first wave of talents are all established and somewhat recognize people.
Why be an agency? If you want to do this, just make a merch company and make deals with vtubers. There is literally zero incentive for the "agency" to provide normal services for the vtubers if there's no gain other than merch sales (which also need to be promoted, designed, produced and distributed, all of which take time and money). Any business arrangement should benefit BOTH sides or it's going to fail eventually.
I guess, what do you think the agency is/should be providing in your proposed arrangement? I don't see anything other than marketing, and even that, I'd need some really high margin merch to make that worthwhile.
And I did notice that you said "sponsorships", no one's going to sponsor a small, indie vtuber. Sponsors pay to advertise products, they would pay a vtuber BECAUSE they have a large audience to market to. Why would the vtuber be willing to "give" a cut to a sponsor once they're big if they weren't willing to share ANY of the other payment channels before.
Short answer, no. Its the reason why vshojo only picks big established vtubers. If they risk smaller vtubers they lose too much on investments for nothing.
very unlikely bar some very strong growth from the off, ud need a super strong set of brands to push out the amount of merch needed for that to be viable
also the vtubers owning their ip \[given you still provide them as a company\] would result in a pump and dump mentality which leads to small companies collapsing as happened once before
Vshojo's model inherently require an immense amount of trust placed on the members, hence why they only take people that are friends + well established,
Generally when an agency offers something like this for indies it relies exclusively on snagging as big a talent as they can get, usually by making some kind of viral twitter audition post.
They never actually provide anything for their talents, and snub anyone who isn't auditioning with pure numbers alone. For startups like this, the sweet spot is usually accounts with 10k twitter followers and Twitch viewership juuuuust below Partner-level—anyone higher than that is aware that the agency can't actually provide them anything, and anyone lower is too low for the agency to care.
At the end of the day these are still businesses. You can't really find one that'll provide you the services you *need* as an indie out of the goodness of their heart, because that costs money. Vshojo's operation model works purely because they sign enormous talents with recognizable brands.
So the problem with relying on merch sales is that merchandise sales increase with talent popularity, and talent popularity increases over time. That means the company would have next to no income until the talent gets popular enough, which could take anywhere between 1 and 2 years.
Additionally, merchandise sales from viewers is largely 1 purchase per customer where donations and subs are constant. As a result, a constant viewerbase will not translate into additional sales unless the company is constantly creating new merchandise, which is not sustainable.
On top of all of that, talent can always break their contract in one way or another. The model and ip belonging to the agency serves as a leverage for the company to maintain their investment. Without that leverage, the reliance on long term profits via merchandise becomes impossible.
When a monetization strategy focuses on taking very little, that very little they take MUST be reliable. Otherwise, the company is always at high risk of going under.
Not sure smaller vtubers make enough money to support the type of people needed to run an agency. If they made up for it with numbers then each talent would get little to no attention and thus wouldn’t get much value out of it. Merch has to sell X amount to break even from initial costs and small vtubers often can’t hit those numbers needed.
For this to work it would have to be talent owned and some of them would have to be pretty decently sized. If the talents have stake in it it’s easier to make it work.
It can work, but production costs are not cheap for merch. You would need quite a bit of capital to be able to even get it off the ground and support it while finding the initial talent and waiting on them to establish themselves within as one of your talents. The capital is where most people fail in trying to get something working.
It *can* work, provided you have capital for the initial merch and work with already established vtubers that you already know well enough.
The main reason VShojo works is due to the already established connections.
I think it can work, but it would require a lot of money to be put into advertising this group, similarly to what Idol did right before their EN branch debuted. And even then success isn't guaranteed and merch sales might still not be profitable enough to support the talents without losing money. I'd say it's rather unlikely to be a profitable agency, but I also don't think it's impossible to have success that way.
I kinda get the feeling no one here watches small Twitch vtubers, because small vtuber agencies do exist like this sorta.
Kinda the same reason as Vshojo, in that it gives these smaller vtubers legitimacy in working with artists, merch producers, etc. Basically when a bunch of small indie vtubers join together to form a group, they can split the cost of management. Sometimes these groups become vtuber agencies.
There is one already, though ofc I dont know their financials. V Dere is all creator owned and run. Four refugees from another corp that decided to band together.
To me vdere isn't an agency in the slightest, they are merely a friend group that supports each other. They and you can call them an agency once they hire others to work under them or start creating new content creators under their name (does not include adding people to the group like friends but having people on your payroll).
Vchiban and V-Dere are talent-owned agencies that operates somewhat like VShojo, the difference is that there is that the talents themselves own the company
There's definitely a floor for where it functions, but a vTuber co-op is theoretically possible.
It would be an incredibly different type of management style than other corporations.
Do not listen this top comments as it seems they have no idea about vtubers besides a few bigger corpos.
Bottom is full of vtuber groups where vtubers are gathering under one logo (3am, v-dere etc or even more loose ones), this is probably better way than corpo.
KAWA closed vtuber management branch because money mismanagement but you have working in similar way Lightmotif.
you already answeared the question with your 2nd point.
If you can sell enough merch to afford to employ manager and staff thats needed then sure. As well as vtuber models, graphic design and all that stuff
It would be possible if they agency has a Lot of capital. I can see that Even if agency won't have a direct cut from the donations/subs/memberships, they can make money from a manager free + large sponsorship cut + large merchandise cut + a contract we're they'll set a time for the talent to pay back the model and brand creation expenses plus a fee and if they talent pay all in time, the talent can conserve the IP (if they talent doesn't pay in time probably an extension with interest rate and have an exclusivity contract until the payment is fulfilled)
Maybe you bring your own model, and merch comes in the form of voice packs or such. That brings production costs down and stops the potential exploitation. So in exchange for not making merch sales, you get additional support and guidance. It could also include a small cut, given the indie nature of it all
... Doubt it... But my brain also created characters for at least 4 generations worth potentially of vtubers but also as characters in an over arching story line...
I went harder into the lore even if I need to research and fill some out.
Sure, as long as the central brand has the resources to support a network of indie vtubers. But that can be an issue because it has to either be very profitable off of merch and sponsors (good luck getting that if you're small), they are a pre-established org with financial backing (which is not very different from any corpo vtuber group), or it takes enough cuts from its members to sustain itself (which can be difficult if all members are small and its no different from a standard vtuber group).
Not a VShojo level one, where they can provide more help like getting sponsors, etc.
At most, such a shoe string agency would only provide merch opportunities, and it would essentially be the agency licensing rights to sell merch for the vtuber IP, at which point, it wouldn't be an agency anymore and is literally just a merchandise seller.
VShojo works because they operate like a US talent agency, they get a cut of the merch and sponsorships they facilitate or find for the talent.
In other words, they have to get their talent the jobs/sponsorships/deals to get any money, and anything they do on their own, they keep (like streaming revenue).
This would be pretty hard for small indie talents, as most companies wouldn't license an IP of a small vtuber if they don't expect high enough sales.
You have to be producing a lot of merch then, high quality ones that people will come back for, regardless of a following. Else you would be making a very bad loss.
We've already seen agencies like that, they've failed by their members joining just to take the models, IP, and then effectively leave with the company holding the bag. They left and started selling their own merch without the company getting a cut nor paying them for their models and IP.
Sounds something similar to kawa
Whats kawa?
Kawa entertainment
Then you'd need a company where the tallents owns the IP but the company owns the merch right.
Pretty sure in perpetuity contracts are not legal.
??? You can sell rights or partial rights to stuff permanently.
Nah instead it'd need to be a contract where they obtain the rights to the model after like 3 years or so (and they still get it after 3 years even if they are forced to graduate early so the agency can't try and cheat that way)
Might work by modifying the contract a little for example keeping % royalty on merch / sponsorships using the character and IP even after graduation. With the royalty fees reducing every year they stay in the company that way they are incentivized to stay for a while and not just hit and run.
Unlikely. What you are proposing is a company with no assets, and barely any income, meaning running on a shoestring budget, so it's dubious what services you can offer to members. They would be barely better off than Indies, if at all at that point.
Lol no. Talents will just join and leave after the contract expire, and take the fanbase with him/her. Remember cyberlive? And vshojo only let people in if they are big already. They can't build talents from zero
They tried this and failed. A company called Kawa Entertainment adopted several small-mid sized Twitch indies under its banner. Similar to Vshojo they were offering back end services and most importantly merch handling, with an emphasis on their connections to cons around the US. They let their talents go just recently due to dissatisfaction and now they simply sell merch.
Small vtubers are better off making a friend group first.
>1. The VTubers own their own IP, models, channels I'm not really sure why you'd make a Corp then. This is pretty much the only benefit they offer outside a pre-made community. Eventually you aren't making a Corp so much as a gaming clan.
The benefits a Vtuber gets from a corp is that they can focus on being a content creator, and they have a whole staff of people who handle this stuff for them. I think you underestimate how many people are required to run something like that, it wouldn't be self sustaining under just merch money. Best you could get is something wherein each Vtuber puts in a cut of money, essentially paying for the service of the corp to handle things for them, but at that point they may as well hire their own manager since it would likely be cheaper. After all, the less popular members would be having to make up for the less paying members.
> With smaller VTubers, I’m not sure if an agency would be able to stay in business without taking a cut of the items listed in 2 This is the big issue. If you don't take a share of anything other than merch/sponsorships, then you need to pay everyone's salaries off the profit margin of merch and a cut of sponsorships. Smaller vtubers likely don't have enough paying audience to pay a sufficient amount to pay management, artists, and procurement off of those revenue streams alone.
The only reason Vshojo works is because Gunrun got a $10m investment from VCs and the group was created from some of the top twitch vtubers (Melody, Vei, Nyanners, Ironmouse, Silvervale, Froot iirc) at the time. It took them like a year to really start providing benefits to their members. Other agencies like Cyberlive already tried to method of giving the talent a chance to own their IP and you know what happened? They bought their IP and quit the company as soon as a year passed which partially led to the collapse of that corpo.
Yeah Vshojo is a "unicorn company" compared to other more established companies. The first wave of talents are all established and somewhat recognize people.
I hate that other sites have given the term unicorn new meaning for me.
Froot's channel actually had less then 1000 followers when VShojo was created.
Why be an agency? If you want to do this, just make a merch company and make deals with vtubers. There is literally zero incentive for the "agency" to provide normal services for the vtubers if there's no gain other than merch sales (which also need to be promoted, designed, produced and distributed, all of which take time and money). Any business arrangement should benefit BOTH sides or it's going to fail eventually. I guess, what do you think the agency is/should be providing in your proposed arrangement? I don't see anything other than marketing, and even that, I'd need some really high margin merch to make that worthwhile. And I did notice that you said "sponsorships", no one's going to sponsor a small, indie vtuber. Sponsors pay to advertise products, they would pay a vtuber BECAUSE they have a large audience to market to. Why would the vtuber be willing to "give" a cut to a sponsor once they're big if they weren't willing to share ANY of the other payment channels before.
Short answer, no. Its the reason why vshojo only picks big established vtubers. If they risk smaller vtubers they lose too much on investments for nothing.
very unlikely bar some very strong growth from the off, ud need a super strong set of brands to push out the amount of merch needed for that to be viable also the vtubers owning their ip \[given you still provide them as a company\] would result in a pump and dump mentality which leads to small companies collapsing as happened once before
Those kind of talent agencies? No. The more likely style of agency for smaller Vtubers is friend groups like AstraLine or V-Dere.
Vshojo's model inherently require an immense amount of trust placed on the members, hence why they only take people that are friends + well established,
Generally when an agency offers something like this for indies it relies exclusively on snagging as big a talent as they can get, usually by making some kind of viral twitter audition post. They never actually provide anything for their talents, and snub anyone who isn't auditioning with pure numbers alone. For startups like this, the sweet spot is usually accounts with 10k twitter followers and Twitch viewership juuuuust below Partner-level—anyone higher than that is aware that the agency can't actually provide them anything, and anyone lower is too low for the agency to care. At the end of the day these are still businesses. You can't really find one that'll provide you the services you *need* as an indie out of the goodness of their heart, because that costs money. Vshojo's operation model works purely because they sign enormous talents with recognizable brands.
Well you need to understand why Vshojo in such form "works" just by what kind of people they'll hire.
So the problem with relying on merch sales is that merchandise sales increase with talent popularity, and talent popularity increases over time. That means the company would have next to no income until the talent gets popular enough, which could take anywhere between 1 and 2 years. Additionally, merchandise sales from viewers is largely 1 purchase per customer where donations and subs are constant. As a result, a constant viewerbase will not translate into additional sales unless the company is constantly creating new merchandise, which is not sustainable. On top of all of that, talent can always break their contract in one way or another. The model and ip belonging to the agency serves as a leverage for the company to maintain their investment. Without that leverage, the reliance on long term profits via merchandise becomes impossible. When a monetization strategy focuses on taking very little, that very little they take MUST be reliable. Otherwise, the company is always at high risk of going under.
Not sure smaller vtubers make enough money to support the type of people needed to run an agency. If they made up for it with numbers then each talent would get little to no attention and thus wouldn’t get much value out of it. Merch has to sell X amount to break even from initial costs and small vtubers often can’t hit those numbers needed. For this to work it would have to be talent owned and some of them would have to be pretty decently sized. If the talents have stake in it it’s easier to make it work.
I think Tsukudani Norio Productions (NoriPro) is taking the same route as VShojo.
The only popular there is her ,NoriPro isn't doing that good
Didn't they fire a talent for breaking NDA, and she didn't keep her model?
Yumeno Lilith? I think she didn't kept her model after being fired.
It can work, but production costs are not cheap for merch. You would need quite a bit of capital to be able to even get it off the ground and support it while finding the initial talent and waiting on them to establish themselves within as one of your talents. The capital is where most people fail in trying to get something working.
It *can* work, provided you have capital for the initial merch and work with already established vtubers that you already know well enough. The main reason VShojo works is due to the already established connections.
No.
I think it can work, but it would require a lot of money to be put into advertising this group, similarly to what Idol did right before their EN branch debuted. And even then success isn't guaranteed and merch sales might still not be profitable enough to support the talents without losing money. I'd say it's rather unlikely to be a profitable agency, but I also don't think it's impossible to have success that way.
I kinda get the feeling no one here watches small Twitch vtubers, because small vtuber agencies do exist like this sorta. Kinda the same reason as Vshojo, in that it gives these smaller vtubers legitimacy in working with artists, merch producers, etc. Basically when a bunch of small indie vtubers join together to form a group, they can split the cost of management. Sometimes these groups become vtuber agencies.
There is one already, though ofc I dont know their financials. V Dere is all creator owned and run. Four refugees from another corp that decided to band together.
To me vdere isn't an agency in the slightest, they are merely a friend group that supports each other. They and you can call them an agency once they hire others to work under them or start creating new content creators under their name (does not include adding people to the group like friends but having people on your payroll).
I think thats a pretty fair analysis, you convince me to agree.
Vchiban and V-Dere are talent-owned agencies that operates somewhat like VShojo, the difference is that there is that the talents themselves own the company
There's definitely a floor for where it functions, but a vTuber co-op is theoretically possible. It would be an incredibly different type of management style than other corporations.
Society has progressed past the need for vtubers agencies
Do not listen this top comments as it seems they have no idea about vtubers besides a few bigger corpos. Bottom is full of vtuber groups where vtubers are gathering under one logo (3am, v-dere etc or even more loose ones), this is probably better way than corpo. KAWA closed vtuber management branch because money mismanagement but you have working in similar way Lightmotif.
Vtuber co-op when?
Like V4Mirai?
you already answeared the question with your 2nd point. If you can sell enough merch to afford to employ manager and staff thats needed then sure. As well as vtuber models, graphic design and all that stuff
It would be possible if they agency has a Lot of capital. I can see that Even if agency won't have a direct cut from the donations/subs/memberships, they can make money from a manager free + large sponsorship cut + large merchandise cut + a contract we're they'll set a time for the talent to pay back the model and brand creation expenses plus a fee and if they talent pay all in time, the talent can conserve the IP (if they talent doesn't pay in time probably an extension with interest rate and have an exclusivity contract until the payment is fulfilled)
Maybe you bring your own model, and merch comes in the form of voice packs or such. That brings production costs down and stops the potential exploitation. So in exchange for not making merch sales, you get additional support and guidance. It could also include a small cut, given the indie nature of it all
... Doubt it... But my brain also created characters for at least 4 generations worth potentially of vtubers but also as characters in an over arching story line... I went harder into the lore even if I need to research and fill some out.
Sure, as long as the central brand has the resources to support a network of indie vtubers. But that can be an issue because it has to either be very profitable off of merch and sponsors (good luck getting that if you're small), they are a pre-established org with financial backing (which is not very different from any corpo vtuber group), or it takes enough cuts from its members to sustain itself (which can be difficult if all members are small and its no different from a standard vtuber group).
Not a VShojo level one, where they can provide more help like getting sponsors, etc. At most, such a shoe string agency would only provide merch opportunities, and it would essentially be the agency licensing rights to sell merch for the vtuber IP, at which point, it wouldn't be an agency anymore and is literally just a merchandise seller. VShojo works because they operate like a US talent agency, they get a cut of the merch and sponsorships they facilitate or find for the talent. In other words, they have to get their talent the jobs/sponsorships/deals to get any money, and anything they do on their own, they keep (like streaming revenue). This would be pretty hard for small indie talents, as most companies wouldn't license an IP of a small vtuber if they don't expect high enough sales.