Sorry it's a lil quiet today, was coughing a lot today so i took it a bit easy yapping in the laundromat is honestly the meta, ok, what else are we gonna do while we wait?
I've thought this since I learned about VTuber agencies. I'm 30 years old, I say that to say that I've been watching RUclips, basically since the beginning. And I'm a gamer, so most of the content I've watched on RUclips has been Let's Plays and just gaming content in general, and several years ago, in the gaming RUclips sphere, Multi Channel Networks, or MCN's were a thing. Back in the early days of RUclips, most video game companies didn't understand that RUclips videos could be huge sources of free marketing for their games, so the video game companies loved to copyright strike gaming videos left and right. MCN's started popping up, and you could join one, and then instead of the RUclips ad revenue going straight to you, it would go to the MCN first, then the MCN would take a "small portion" of the money, and then pass on the rest to you. And for that cut that you gave to the MCN, they were supposed to go to bat for you in dealing with the legal aspects of the copyright system. MCN's really don't exist anymore, because a bunch of shit went down, like MCN's having too many channels to manage and not enough staff to handle it, so a bunch of RUclipsrs were getting shafted, and then some MCN's were mishandling money, and RUclipsrs were going like months and months without getting their revenue from the MCN they were signed with. Ultimately it all boiled down to people realizing that joining an MCN just wasn't worth the risk and it was safer to just be an "indie" RUclipsr, although, back then we didn't use the term, you would just say that you weren't with an MCN. When I learned of VTuber agencies, I just felt that déjà vu of MCN's all over again.
Yep! I actually want to make a video on this sort of idea. I think VTubing in general is following the same content pattern and pattern of mistakes of early youtube, because it's people who weren't necessarily involved in content creation or even watching all of it in the past. It's people who were anime nerds, who liked cartoons and mass produced stuff, but when going into content creation themselves with vtubing.. they just don't know much about the space. It's funny, though, as somebody who's also 30+ and lived through all of that, I still ended up in an agency, because I still genuinely believed and trusted that they wanted to make the things I hoped for come true. They're very convincing, in most cases, or hell, a lot of them even have good aspirations starting out... they just don't make it, it just doesn't work the way you want it to. 😮💨
@@koziitwo Yeah, most of the people that are looking to get started VTubing are young'n's that just don't know the history. I think it would be a great idea to do a video going over the history of MCN's and the potential similarities to VTuber agencies. I would totally watch that video.
This video just appeared on my home page and I got curious! I've never been and I'm also personally not interested in joining an agency myself and all the reason you stated are why I am not. A lot of people blindly walk into one thinking they can get the same treatment as some bigger ones SEEM to be getting, but reality is much more rough than that... Agency doesn't mean free ticket to fame & easy collab partners. This is a great video! I enjoyed watching it, your model is amazing and you speak very clearly 🌹I am sure this will help a lot of vtubers wannabe that are unsure about it. Thanks for sharing your experience!
*They’re just as bad as “Music Labels”. Our comments are popular on others’ channels and agencies try to scout us to become V Tubers* *Rina and I are not trying to become V Tubers. We’re Writers and Musicians. We write in our own style and compose our songs in our own way. We are not going to conform to what “mainstream” audiences want.* *They’re honestly just bugging!*
It's possible to make friends at work; it's rare. Your viewers are the same viewers that this person wants. In most cases, that's your competition, not your friends, and anyone going into this thinking that an agency is full of friends, they're not thinking it all the way through.
When I look at the best perceived agencies in VTubing space right now (Phase Connect, VShojo & Hololive), most of the time you can feel genuine connection between talents, in their off-collabs, interactions outside of only streams. When agency/CEO know, what is good for making great environment for talents as a group (add basic payment and care for health and other thinks considered as "care"), this feels like best conditions for success. If an agency treats VTubers as just "entities" being contractual workers and nothing more, you will have most of the time this mindset of competition (Niji and most other agencies).
Thanks for the video, it was very informative. I'm not trying to be a vtuber but even as a viewer it is interesting to know a bit more about what happens behind the scenes. Also, your haircut is really cute. Thanks again, have a nice day.
First, great vid. Second, is really surprising how you uploaded this video and only a few days later V-SHOJO opens applications for new talents. That being said... Let's see... Agree that agencies ultimately want to make money. They are a company after all. But, and this may be me being somewhat optimistic, i do think some agencies do care for their talents. They are the source of moneymaking. Can't really achieve that if the talents under your umbrella don't grow or they have internal struggles. V-SHOJO and Hololive are the ones that come to mind as examples in that regard. With ironmouse's health issues, michi/matara/kuro's previous experience in their former agency (which shall not be named. If you follow vtubing, you know who) and how they ended up joining them. As for hololive, the only recent incident i can think of is when Mio was hospitalized. Think phase connect is also good? Suppose they are on top of things and try to at least have their talents mesh well when looking to bring in new people. Plus i do believe some have their own therapist/s when burnout happens Of course, these are big companies, so they have the leeway. Far as i've seen, they do their best to be right to them and provide when they can. Smaller agencies i can't really speak about as i hadn't really checked any vtuber belonging to one up until recently, so... I'll reserve my opinions on that one, though i do lean towards agreeing on your rant as you call it Anyways, suppose in the end, it all comes down to if the agencies care about their talents in order to make money or if they care about making money period. And agreed that you don't need to join an agency to make it big, but it probably eases up on some things? Especially if you suck at say... Managing Edit: Oh! Also found your twitter and followed. Expect my ramblings there if you post anything that needs a bighead xD
This was a very high quality insightful video on your experiences! Very difficult to find people who drive at VTubing content as a profession. Thank you for sharing!
It's interesting that vtubing ended up so agency-centric. If you asked me in 2017, I'd have assumed that vtubers would work the same way that most youtubers and streamers do, working largely for themselves and only bringing an agency on if they get big enough that they need help managing the business. Nijisanji and especially Hololive seem to have defined vtubing culture early on as something that involves a lot of collaboration and big projects, and I wonder if the swarm of small agencies we now see are the result of aspiring vtubers seeing these established agencies and seeking a similar "family-like" atmosphere for themselves to what they see these established agencies portraying. And I wonder if the same thing, the dominance of Hololive, would have happened if at the start of vtubing, models and rigging software were already very accessible to indies.
The thing there is, what struck me as new about vtuber agencies at the time was that i'd never seen streamers being filtered for talent in that sense before. i was very active on Twitch, mainly with what we would call the retrogaming side, and streamers were just my friends or people who happened to be good at a game i cared about. Learning about Hololive in 2020 blew me away because i'd never seen, say, a 2000-Elo Tetris player who could also sing professionally. Over time as i got to see more of the agency experience in action i became less of a close follower of it all, but i think something like this would've always happened just for that part of it alone
@@joshthefunkdoc But that's only true of Hololive, no other agency is that selective. I don't think something like this would always have happened, it only happened because Yagoo is a weirdo who puts quality over profit.
Really interesting thing with this, I actually wanna talk about it at some point, if not in a video maybe a stream or something, but, agencies hit upon something that I think is incredibly important in most streaming circles - a consistent friend group. They may be fabricated sometimes, but vtubers in particular are really good at being 'professional' friends as opposed to just normal friends, particularly because a lot of them are playing up more of a character. In all aspects of streaming, the most popular streamers become popular *together*. They form a group, on purpose or not, and they rise through their interactions with one another, and their communities intermingling. See things like OTK, or the old among us group with OfflineTV and friends. I think this is a big part of the reason why agencies popped off so hard, and keep rising - they're interactive groups of friends, which, when they get new people, fans get interested in how they'll interact with old faces, and who will like who, and what stuff they'll play together. It's just weird to me that vtubers haven't really formed these groups more naturally, and resort mostly to agencies. I think it would be cool to see more things like the found family group Vchiban, or just friend groups that don't really have an official name amongst them.
@@koziitwo I wonder if vtubing has too much of a tie to idol culture to regularly form natural friend groups. Most idol groups are assembled through agencies, rather than friends deciding to become musicians together, and maybe that's normalised enough in Japan that people come to view the "get scouted by an agency, get put in a group" approach as the way things should be done. It's also probably not as easy to make friends amongst vtubers, since it'll attract a higher proportion of shy people, where traditional streaming is a very outgoing activity - I know I'd never want to feel like I was imposing on someone, and you have to impose a little to start collaborating. And perhaps with characters at play too, relationships feel less authentic?
I considered applying to Nijisanji years ago but kinda preferred being indie just because I knew there'd be limitations and asterisks when joining a group, but I also wanted to be able to support myself sooner so I could finally move out, then the whole Nijisanji drama happened and any temptation I had to join any group vanished. I already knew about a lot of the dangers of working in a vtuber group but I was desperate to be able to work in a creative industry instead of slaving away at convenience store lol
Some (mostly already disappeared/failed) agencies are basically ceo's anime dream. Like being surrounded by harem of anime girls. One of the most dangerous agencies.
Word! A lot of companies take the sensation of being an appreciated hobby vtuber or a successful indy and sell it to you as something you can be. To draw you in. But in reality they will try to lift up the vtuber, while the person behind the keyboard it is just an employee. I think people joining even an adoption agency need to realise that to get hired they need to pay a fee in autonomy. And that is a HIGH cost that will not be worth it to most. Vshojo seems to create an ideal on what a company should be, but it takes 0 risks with talents, them all being already profitable personas and has such a small pool of talents it cant be compared to anything else. They are like a Pokemon trainer that only uses fully evolved, high base stat, good ability pokemon. They can afford to put good items and vitamines on their team cause the meta showed the team is viable. In reality most companies are a first time trainer that dont know you evolve by a moonstone and will yell at you for not evolving soon enough...but they will potion you up or give you an oran berry if it keeps them in the battle.
Also I would think of the recent history and events of agency... Something that in past looked good might not offer the same thing anymore. And on other hand some could be improving a lot from past and growing themselves to be better.
Some of them are! That's why if someone wants to get into an agency, they've just gotta be careful and look over things closely, plus make sure the agencies they want to join are offering things they need. 👌 Some of them I'd say are definitely a lot better than others.
It’s really true, imo. Most agencies, I really believe, are started with good intentions, (but certainly not all of them). I can definitely understand “why” an agency is helpful, at least on paper. but there are indies that hit it big, and there are agency VT’s that faded away. And then there’s the weird other option, where vtubers are with a talent agency, and there’s quite a few of them. It remains to be seen how that works, long term.
A Question for you Kozii - I can see the logic thatt some people argue about agency talents essentially wanting the same audience's attention and wanted to ask a question related to that. How much internal discussion goes on, in you Past experience, around avoiding stream overlaps to prevent audience cannibalization within the agency? Or is it more common for it to be FFA with the most major concern being other agencies?
Depends on the agency. I've definitely heard of quite a few agencies trying to keep overlap down for specific stream times, or even specific topics, where someone has already played a game a lot and has gathered that audience so you don't want them to distribute between several people. My agency didn't do any of that, and honestly, I think it was kind of a mistake. The biggest draw of agencies is that kind of group cohesion, where you can help to push your coworkers growth as much as they help push you. We were not only spread across two entirely different platforms, we also had entirely different content branches, and consistently streamed at the same times as each other with no care to try to change any of that. It was hard to promote others, because by promoting others, they would leave to potentially another platform, or potentially a different streamer during our typical timeslots. I think a lot of small agencies and even larger agencies tend to be a bit of a FFA with it, but I think the ones that do think about that sort of thing tend to have better group cohesion as a whole.
Becoming an agency chuuba is a commitment. Not everyone is able to make such a commitment…And not all failing agencies will die gracefully like the one you were in and PRISM.
I think it really depends on the agency. Like any business you can have several who do the same thing in different ways. At the worst it can be a soul sucking experience with little to no support, at the best you can have a gilded cage with a built in fan base and guaranteed success but minimal control. Then there are ones with more modern ideas like giving the talents all rights to the IP even if they leave the company. Vtubing is experiencing what happened to regular streaming back in the early days, Vtuber Agencies are glorified virtual hype houses, and a few of those worked but a lot more fell apart.
That's why you have to ask questions, do research, and try to figure out what is best for you! But most of the time, honestly, these agencies aren't offering anything you can't do yourself, for cheaper, and probably even more quality most of the time. I do remember the old hype houses, but I actually think they're closer to the old management company days of places like machinima and others that employed youtubers under their banner and claimed to help with stuff like copyright!
@@koziitwo I'd argue the biggest benefit of an agency is just having a second opinion, though. The downside of doing everything yourself is that you have no one checking your work, and we've seen with a lot of streamers, vtubers or otherwise, that some people really need a little voice on their shoulder saying "don't do that".
Differs for each agency. In my case, first a Google form to discuss me, what I like, my content, my numbers, etc. Stage two had us paired into groups of about 4-5 to play some gartic phone and see how we interact in a fake collab setting. Stage 3 had a one on one interview, discussing plans, ideas for the future, kind of just a typical job interview.. and then minutes after that I was told I was selected, as one of the first of my Gen. Apparently they did a background check on me after stage one. I signed an NDA first, around the time we were discussing doing a main interview, then was given contract later on to look over and accept or decline at my leisure. Our agency was an adoption agency, so we went into it with our normal channels and models, and just prepped directly for a new debut with merch asap.
Is the company willing and able and contractually forced to give you tons of money? Then go for it. Otherwise they'll probably cost more value than they provide.
Sorry it's a lil quiet today, was coughing a lot today so i took it a bit easy
yapping in the laundromat is honestly the meta, ok, what else are we gonna do while we wait?
Honestly yapping in the landuary matt is so real also I now vtube on reality
I've thought this since I learned about VTuber agencies. I'm 30 years old, I say that to say that I've been watching RUclips, basically since the beginning. And I'm a gamer, so most of the content I've watched on RUclips has been Let's Plays and just gaming content in general, and several years ago, in the gaming RUclips sphere, Multi Channel Networks, or MCN's were a thing. Back in the early days of RUclips, most video game companies didn't understand that RUclips videos could be huge sources of free marketing for their games, so the video game companies loved to copyright strike gaming videos left and right. MCN's started popping up, and you could join one, and then instead of the RUclips ad revenue going straight to you, it would go to the MCN first, then the MCN would take a "small portion" of the money, and then pass on the rest to you. And for that cut that you gave to the MCN, they were supposed to go to bat for you in dealing with the legal aspects of the copyright system. MCN's really don't exist anymore, because a bunch of shit went down, like MCN's having too many channels to manage and not enough staff to handle it, so a bunch of RUclipsrs were getting shafted, and then some MCN's were mishandling money, and RUclipsrs were going like months and months without getting their revenue from the MCN they were signed with. Ultimately it all boiled down to people realizing that joining an MCN just wasn't worth the risk and it was safer to just be an "indie" RUclipsr, although, back then we didn't use the term, you would just say that you weren't with an MCN. When I learned of VTuber agencies, I just felt that déjà vu of MCN's all over again.
Yep! I actually want to make a video on this sort of idea. I think VTubing in general is following the same content pattern and pattern of mistakes of early youtube, because it's people who weren't necessarily involved in content creation or even watching all of it in the past. It's people who were anime nerds, who liked cartoons and mass produced stuff, but when going into content creation themselves with vtubing.. they just don't know much about the space.
It's funny, though, as somebody who's also 30+ and lived through all of that, I still ended up in an agency, because I still genuinely believed and trusted that they wanted to make the things I hoped for come true. They're very convincing, in most cases, or hell, a lot of them even have good aspirations starting out... they just don't make it, it just doesn't work the way you want it to. 😮💨
@@koziitwo Yeah, most of the people that are looking to get started VTubing are young'n's that just don't know the history. I think it would be a great idea to do a video going over the history of MCN's and the potential similarities to VTuber agencies. I would totally watch that video.
That one would take some more research than random yapping, so probably not right away, but I'll start lookin into stuff!
This video just appeared on my home page and I got curious! I've never been and I'm also personally not interested in joining an agency myself and all the reason you stated are why I am not.
A lot of people blindly walk into one thinking they can get the same treatment as some bigger ones SEEM to be getting, but reality is much more rough than that... Agency doesn't mean free ticket to fame & easy collab partners. This is a great video! I enjoyed watching it, your model is amazing and you speak very clearly 🌹I am sure this will help a lot of vtubers wannabe that are unsure about it. Thanks for sharing your experience!
*They’re just as bad as “Music Labels”. Our comments are popular on others’ channels and agencies try to scout us to become V Tubers*
*Rina and I are not trying to become V Tubers. We’re Writers and Musicians. We write in our own style and compose our songs in our own way. We are not going to conform to what “mainstream” audiences want.*
*They’re honestly just bugging!*
Really loving your videos.
It's possible to make friends at work; it's rare. Your viewers are the same viewers that this person wants. In most cases, that's your competition, not your friends, and anyone going into this thinking that an agency is full of friends, they're not thinking it all the way through.
But you still can make friends of course! I still love a lot of the people I did work with. It's not impossible.. But it is very rare.🙏
When I look at the best perceived agencies in VTubing space right now (Phase Connect, VShojo & Hololive), most of the time you can feel genuine connection between talents, in their off-collabs, interactions outside of only streams.
When agency/CEO know, what is good for making great environment for talents as a group (add basic payment and care for health and other thinks considered as "care"), this feels like best conditions for success.
If an agency treats VTubers as just "entities" being contractual workers and nothing more, you will have most of the time this mindset of competition (Niji and most other agencies).
All the same business happened with the let's play scene 10 years ago.
Though, predatory talent agencies have existed since theater has existed.
Thanks for the video, it was very informative. I'm not trying to be a vtuber but even as a viewer it is interesting to know a bit more about what happens behind the scenes.
Also, your haircut is really cute. Thanks again, have a nice day.
This is really solid advice, thank you for the video!
First, great vid. Second, is really surprising how you uploaded this video and only a few days later V-SHOJO opens applications for new talents. That being said... Let's see...
Agree that agencies ultimately want to make money. They are a company after all. But, and this may be me being somewhat optimistic, i do think some agencies do care for their talents. They are the source of moneymaking. Can't really achieve that if the talents under your umbrella don't grow or they have internal struggles. V-SHOJO and Hololive are the ones that come to mind as examples in that regard. With ironmouse's health issues, michi/matara/kuro's previous experience in their former agency (which shall not be named. If you follow vtubing, you know who) and how they ended up joining them. As for hololive, the only recent incident i can think of is when Mio was hospitalized. Think phase connect is also good? Suppose they are on top of things and try to at least have their talents mesh well when looking to bring in new people. Plus i do believe some have their own therapist/s when burnout happens
Of course, these are big companies, so they have the leeway. Far as i've seen, they do their best to be right to them and provide when they can. Smaller agencies i can't really speak about as i hadn't really checked any vtuber belonging to one up until recently, so... I'll reserve my opinions on that one, though i do lean towards agreeing on your rant as you call it
Anyways, suppose in the end, it all comes down to if the agencies care about their talents in order to make money or if they care about making money period. And agreed that you don't need to join an agency to make it big, but it probably eases up on some things? Especially if you suck at say... Managing
Edit: Oh! Also found your twitter and followed. Expect my ramblings there if you post anything that needs a bighead xD
This was a very high quality insightful video on your experiences! Very difficult to find people who drive at VTubing content as a profession. Thank you for sharing!
Cinnamoroll cursor spotted 👀 Very thoughtful and fleshed out perspective! Keep it up Kozii 💜
Cinnamoroll forever 😭🙏
It's interesting that vtubing ended up so agency-centric. If you asked me in 2017, I'd have assumed that vtubers would work the same way that most youtubers and streamers do, working largely for themselves and only bringing an agency on if they get big enough that they need help managing the business. Nijisanji and especially Hololive seem to have defined vtubing culture early on as something that involves a lot of collaboration and big projects, and I wonder if the swarm of small agencies we now see are the result of aspiring vtubers seeing these established agencies and seeking a similar "family-like" atmosphere for themselves to what they see these established agencies portraying. And I wonder if the same thing, the dominance of Hololive, would have happened if at the start of vtubing, models and rigging software were already very accessible to indies.
The thing there is, what struck me as new about vtuber agencies at the time was that i'd never seen streamers being filtered for talent in that sense before. i was very active on Twitch, mainly with what we would call the retrogaming side, and streamers were just my friends or people who happened to be good at a game i cared about. Learning about Hololive in 2020 blew me away because i'd never seen, say, a 2000-Elo Tetris player who could also sing professionally. Over time as i got to see more of the agency experience in action i became less of a close follower of it all, but i think something like this would've always happened just for that part of it alone
@@joshthefunkdoc But that's only true of Hololive, no other agency is that selective. I don't think something like this would always have happened, it only happened because Yagoo is a weirdo who puts quality over profit.
Really interesting thing with this, I actually wanna talk about it at some point, if not in a video maybe a stream or something, but, agencies hit upon something that I think is incredibly important in most streaming circles - a consistent friend group. They may be fabricated sometimes, but vtubers in particular are really good at being 'professional' friends as opposed to just normal friends, particularly because a lot of them are playing up more of a character.
In all aspects of streaming, the most popular streamers become popular *together*. They form a group, on purpose or not, and they rise through their interactions with one another, and their communities intermingling. See things like OTK, or the old among us group with OfflineTV and friends. I think this is a big part of the reason why agencies popped off so hard, and keep rising - they're interactive groups of friends, which, when they get new people, fans get interested in how they'll interact with old faces, and who will like who, and what stuff they'll play together.
It's just weird to me that vtubers haven't really formed these groups more naturally, and resort mostly to agencies. I think it would be cool to see more things like the found family group Vchiban, or just friend groups that don't really have an official name amongst them.
@@koziitwo I wonder if vtubing has too much of a tie to idol culture to regularly form natural friend groups. Most idol groups are assembled through agencies, rather than friends deciding to become musicians together, and maybe that's normalised enough in Japan that people come to view the "get scouted by an agency, get put in a group" approach as the way things should be done.
It's also probably not as easy to make friends amongst vtubers, since it'll attract a higher proportion of shy people, where traditional streaming is a very outgoing activity - I know I'd never want to feel like I was imposing on someone, and you have to impose a little to start collaborating. And perhaps with characters at play too, relationships feel less authentic?
I considered applying to Nijisanji years ago but kinda preferred being indie just because I knew there'd be limitations and asterisks when joining a group, but I also wanted to be able to support myself sooner so I could finally move out, then the whole Nijisanji drama happened and any temptation I had to join any group vanished. I already knew about a lot of the dangers of working in a vtuber group but I was desperate to be able to work in a creative industry instead of slaving away at convenience store lol
Absolute certified banger. Spot on, Kozii.
Some (mostly already disappeared/failed) agencies are basically ceo's anime dream. Like being surrounded by harem of anime girls. One of the most dangerous agencies.
The blinks per minute is off the chain.
it's been really hot lately so it's pretty dry in here.. i'd get a humidifier but wet heat is way worse than dry heat and blinking a lot lmao
Agreed. Even the "good" agencies cause harm to both the talents and the fans.
You give me Mari Yume vtuber vibes ! Like similar content! I like your content 😊
Hey, thanks! Mari is a friend of mine, so I'm glad!
Word!
A lot of companies take the sensation of being an appreciated hobby vtuber or a successful indy and sell it to you as something you can be. To draw you in.
But in reality they will try to lift up the vtuber, while the person behind the keyboard it is just an employee.
I think people joining even an adoption agency need to realise that to get hired they need to pay a fee in autonomy.
And that is a HIGH cost that will not be worth it to most.
Vshojo seems to create an ideal on what a company should be, but it takes 0 risks with talents, them all being already profitable personas and has such a small pool of talents it cant be compared to anything else.
They are like a Pokemon trainer that only uses fully evolved, high base stat, good ability pokemon. They can afford to put good items and vitamines on their team cause the meta showed the team is viable.
In reality most companies are a first time trainer that dont know you evolve by a moonstone and will yell at you for not evolving soon enough...but they will potion you up or give you an oran berry if it keeps them in the battle.
Also I would think of the recent history and events of agency... Something that in past looked good might not offer the same thing anymore. And on other hand some could be improving a lot from past and growing themselves to be better.
Some of them are! That's why if someone wants to get into an agency, they've just gotta be careful and look over things closely, plus make sure the agencies they want to join are offering things they need. 👌 Some of them I'd say are definitely a lot better than others.
It’s really true, imo. Most agencies, I really believe, are started with good intentions, (but certainly not all of them). I can definitely understand “why” an agency is helpful, at least on paper. but there are indies that hit it big, and there are agency VT’s that faded away. And then there’s the weird other option, where vtubers are with a talent agency, and there’s quite a few of them. It remains to be seen how that works, long term.
A Question for you Kozii - I can see the logic thatt some people argue about agency talents essentially wanting the same audience's attention and wanted to ask a question related to that.
How much internal discussion goes on, in you Past experience, around avoiding stream overlaps to prevent audience cannibalization within the agency?
Or is it more common for it to be FFA with the most major concern being other agencies?
Depends on the agency. I've definitely heard of quite a few agencies trying to keep overlap down for specific stream times, or even specific topics, where someone has already played a game a lot and has gathered that audience so you don't want them to distribute between several people.
My agency didn't do any of that, and honestly, I think it was kind of a mistake. The biggest draw of agencies is that kind of group cohesion, where you can help to push your coworkers growth as much as they help push you. We were not only spread across two entirely different platforms, we also had entirely different content branches, and consistently streamed at the same times as each other with no care to try to change any of that. It was hard to promote others, because by promoting others, they would leave to potentially another platform, or potentially a different streamer during our typical timeslots.
I think a lot of small agencies and even larger agencies tend to be a bit of a FFA with it, but I think the ones that do think about that sort of thing tend to have better group cohesion as a whole.
Becoming an agency chuuba is a commitment. Not everyone is able to make such a commitment…And not all failing agencies will die gracefully like the one you were in and PRISM.
All you said is true for all companies.
Treat you life as if you are the CEO of your own life and make decisions that makes sense for yourself.
I think it really depends on the agency. Like any business you can have several who do the same thing in different ways. At the worst it can be a soul sucking experience with little to no support, at the best you can have a gilded cage with a built in fan base and guaranteed success but minimal control. Then there are ones with more modern ideas like giving the talents all rights to the IP even if they leave the company. Vtubing is experiencing what happened to regular streaming back in the early days, Vtuber Agencies are glorified virtual hype houses, and a few of those worked but a lot more fell apart.
That's why you have to ask questions, do research, and try to figure out what is best for you! But most of the time, honestly, these agencies aren't offering anything you can't do yourself, for cheaper, and probably even more quality most of the time.
I do remember the old hype houses, but I actually think they're closer to the old management company days of places like machinima and others that employed youtubers under their banner and claimed to help with stuff like copyright!
@@koziitwo I'd argue the biggest benefit of an agency is just having a second opinion, though. The downside of doing everything yourself is that you have no one checking your work, and we've seen with a lot of streamers, vtubers or otherwise, that some people really need a little voice on their shoulder saying "don't do that".
A lot of good deep information. Bigger is not always better.
What do you think about Phase?
Loved the video, I've already sent it to some friends
Some things need to be said
I really do want to become a vtubers I cants sand myself on camera
Why are entertainment agencies having their talent sign NDA? That already screams red flag
I might actually make a video about this, might be an interesting thing to cover 🤔
are you saying independent dont need NDA?
As someone that doesn't want to be a vtuber and is just curious, what does an audition for an agency look like.
Differs for each agency. In my case, first a Google form to discuss me, what I like, my content, my numbers, etc. Stage two had us paired into groups of about 4-5 to play some gartic phone and see how we interact in a fake collab setting. Stage 3 had a one on one interview, discussing plans, ideas for the future, kind of just a typical job interview.. and then minutes after that I was told I was selected, as one of the first of my Gen.
Apparently they did a background check on me after stage one. I signed an NDA first, around the time we were discussing doing a main interview, then was given contract later on to look over and accept or decline at my leisure.
Our agency was an adoption agency, so we went into it with our normal channels and models, and just prepped directly for a new debut with merch asap.
Is the company willing and able and contractually forced to give you tons of money? Then go for it. Otherwise they'll probably cost more value than they provide.
True!
cope video
k lol