Let me start with the part I usually skip over.

I knew nothing about this. Not a little. Nothing.

Before this episode I could not have told you what a VTuber was. I had seen the avatars — the anime characters with the big eyes and the coloured hair — and I had filed them somewhere between gaming and cosplay and never thought about it again. When I sat down to record, I said out loud that most people watching would have no idea what VTubing actually is.

Including me.

The assumption I walked in with

I thought faceless content was the easy option.

That is not a considered position, it is a reflex. If you do not have to show your face, you do not have to do your makeup, you do not have to manage how you look, you do not have to be the product. So it must be easier. That is the logic, and I suspect most people reading this share it.

I now think it is completely backwards, and I want to explain why before I say anything about the conversation.

Look at what is already crowded. Walking videos. ASMR. Travel channels with no narration. Every one of those formats removes the person from the frame — and every one of those formats is saturated to the point of being unwinnable for a newcomer.

When you take the face out, you do not remove the difficulty. You move it.

Now the idea has to carry everything. The voice has to carry everything. If there is no talking at all, the concept has to be strong enough to survive without the single most efficient tool human beings have for creating connection with a stranger.

A face does an enormous amount of work. It signals warmth, credibility, mood, safety, all in under a second and all without you saying anything. Take it away and every one of those jobs has to be done deliberately, by something else.

That is not easier. That is a much harder brief.

The number that genuinely surprised me

I went looking for the size of this market afterwards, because I did not believe what I was assuming.

The global anime industry hit a record ¥3.84 trillion in 2024 — roughly 25 billion US dollars. It grew almost 15% in a single year. That is the industry’s own census figure, not an analyst’s estimate.

And here is the part that stopped me: for the first time, most of that money now comes from outside Japan. Overseas revenue was around 14 billion dollars, up 26% year on year, and it overtook the domestic market in 2023.

Forecasters put the growth rate somewhere between 9% and 11% compounding for the next decade. On those numbers the market roughly doubles.

I had it filed as a subculture. It is not a subculture. It is a serious industry with a serious growth curve, and it is growing fastest in the places furthest from where it started.

What I actually wanted to ask

I did not want to make an explainer. There are enough of those.

What I wanted to know was whether a person can genuinely build a career this way. Not go viral once. Build something that pays rent, over years, with a ceiling worth climbing towards.

And if the answer is yes — what does it actually cost to get there? Not the equipment. The rest of it.

I also wanted to know something more specific, and slightly more selfish.

The part I keep thinking about

If you are shy. If you are awkward on camera. If there is something about your appearance you have never made peace with. If you were the one who got bullied, or was never quite recognised, or simply did not fit anywhere — does this give you a way in?

Because if it does, that matters more than the market size.

Almost every route into creator work assumes you are comfortable being looked at. That single assumption filters out an enormous number of talented people before they start. Introverts. People who are self-conscious. People who cannot leave the house easily. People who need the income more than most and have the least access to it.

A format that removes the requirement to be seen is not a gimmick. It is an access ramp.

That is the thing I did not expect to care about going in, and it is the thing I care about most coming out.

The question I am still uncomfortable about

Here is where I want to be honest rather than tidy.

Some people find their only real community in these spaces, because they are outcast everywhere else. Everyone knows Phoebe from Friends. Everyone knows a Phoebe. Some people are Phoebe. Not everyone accepts Phoebe openly like Friends does. And if a stream is where they finally feel seen, I am not going to be sniffy about that.

But I am also not going to romanticise it.

The research on this is reasonably clear and not especially comforting. These connections tend to sit somewhere between an acquaintance and a genuine friendship. They beat weak in-person ties. They lose to strong ones. They reliably make people feel better. They do not reliably make people feel less alone.

So my position is both things at once. I am glad the room exists. I would still rather people had something outside it too.

I do not think that is a contradiction. I think it is just the honest version.

And the one that is entirely about me

I am lazy about makeup.

That is not a joke, it is a real friction in my working life. Every time I go live for one of my businesses there is a moment where I think — I have to do this again. Cover the dark circles. Assemble a presentable version of myself. Forty minutes before I have said a single useful thing.

So somewhere in this process I started genuinely wondering whether I should have an avatar.

Not as a bit. As an actual operational question. Could a version of me show up without me having to be camera-ready? Would that be useful, or would it be a gimmick? Would anyone accept it — or would it break the one thing this podcast is built on, which is that nothing here gets cleaned up first?

I do not know. I genuinely do not know.

What I did not see coming

The thing that reset my thinking was not any single fact. It was realising how serious this is.

I had assumed this was a hobby that occasionally makes money. It is a career track — with an entry point, a ceiling, a brutally competitive middle, and an exit almost nobody outside it has heard of.

And the level of investment people make to be among the best is nothing like what I imagined. I will let them tell you that part themselves, because when I heard the actual figures on the recording my face did something I am glad we captured.

So I asked three people who do this for a living

Meemo. Seika. KiraKiraKat.

Between them, well over a decade inside this industry — as independents, inside agencies, and on the management side of it. One of them left a corporate job for this. One of them has been streaming since long before any of it had a name. One of them builds the creative work the whole thing runs on.

I asked them what it costs. What happens when the money comes in. What nobody warns you about. Whether it is still worth it.

They did not give me the clean version.

I have been thinking about this conversation for days, which does not usually happen to me with a topic I knew nothing about a month ago.

The full conversation is up now on Spotify – that’s where all our uncut episode sits. If you have ever wondered whether you could build something without putting your face on the internet forever — or if you assumed, like I did, that it would be the easy way — I would start there.

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What I stripped and why: every figure, quote and reveal from the recording. The entry cost, the production budgets, the age line, the business-model reframe, the ownership moment, the income reality, the names of the creators they cite, the ending. All of it is now only available by watching.

What stayed: your eight points, your reasoning, and public market data the guests never mention — so the post adds context the episode doesn’t have, instead of competing with it.

One correction to your brief: you said “more than 10 billion.” It’s about $25 billion. You were understating it by more than half, and the real figure makes your point stronger.

Sources:

• Association of Japanese Animations — Anime Industry Report 2025
• Variety — Japan’s anime market hits record $25 billion
• Grand View Research — Anime Market forecast
• Lotun et al. 2024, Scientific Reports — parasocial relationships and emotional needs
• Tukachinsky, Walter & Saucier 2020, Journal of Communication — meta-analysis

About Guest

Kira is a game artist, a cosplayer since around 2005, a voice actor, and she was a new mother with a two-year-old when she started streaming. She is also the one who talks most openly about mental health, and I will come back to that.

Seika has been streaming since her law school days, when playing games with her batchmates was the only way she recovered from the week. She builds communities now, organises meetups in Manila, and she is the one who said the most practical thing in the whole conversation: her very first customisable avatar cost eighteen dollars.

Meemo is Japanese-Filipino, a singer, and before any of this she had a corporate job in Japan. In recruitment, as it happens. She talks about being in the office all day and all night, working overtime, and then being scouted into VTubing in 2020 — and she uses the word escape. She had also been an idol, which is where she said the line I have not stopped thinking about. She was twenty years old and she was already considered old for the industry.