Inside the cavernous Kings Theatre in Brooklyn, New York, the crowd started shouting in anticipation of the concert that was set to begin, but one lone voice cut through the roar: “Yaaaaaagoooooooooo!”
The event was Hololive’s Breaking Dimensions concert on Aug. 24, a show where digital performers known as Vtubers sing and dance live onstage as holograms. Yagoo isn’t a Vtuber, however, but a flesh-and-blood buttoned-up CEO named Motoaki Tanigo. Motoaki heads up Cover Corporation, the company that owns and operates Hololive Production, one of the largest Vtuber agencies in the world.
In 2022, people swarmed to Vtuber content, with the streaming platform Twitch reporting that viewership of Vtubing content was up 350% compared to the year before. In the fall of 2023, Cover’s Vtubers had more than 83 million subscribers combined. This summer, the company put on its second live concert in English the same weekend as the Anime NYC convention.
However, not all has been well. Controversies in the broader Vtuber world highlight the tension between talent and the giant agencies that manage them, and independent Vtubers have criticized agencies for being inflexible. While other top Vtuber agencies contend with criticism, and the reputations of some tech CEOs are spiraling, Motoaki is beloved by the fandom.
To learn more about the future of Cover and Hololive, Polygon chatted with Motoaki and Max Sung Yoon Kim, the U.S. sales and licensing director for Cover, at Anime NYC. We talked about anime, Motoaki’s dreams for Vtubers, the challenges of bringing Vtubters stateside, and the role of fans in growing the reach of Vtuber content.
[Ed. note: The portions of this interview with Motoaki Tanigo were conducted through interpreters. The transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.]
Polygon: Anime has been popular in the United States for a long time, but interest has grown significantly since the pandemic. Do you think American interest in anime creates opportunities for growing Vtubing?
Motoaki Tanigo: In the past 10 years, Japanese anime has doubled in their activities, especially overseas outside Japan. Vtubing is like having your favorite anime avatar livestreaming with you in person. So with that kind of wave, we can ride it to become bigger and bigger.
Polygon: The designs of Vtubers have taken inspiration from anime. Has Cover learned any other lessons from the anime industry more broadly?
Motoaki Tanigo: In anime, you don’t really have just one important character, right? You have their friends and their group, and what we learned from that is how we debut our unique characters in a unit. So we have a sense of a unit and community. And one season of animation could be like one generation, one unit.
Polygon: What do you think is the most important factor to successfully growing Vtubing in a new place? Is it picking the right talent? Is it finding the right way to bring merch to new places? What has been successful for Cover when expanding to the U.S.?
Motoaki Tanigo: All of it, [Motoaki chuckles]. What we’re doing right now in the American market is not as big as in the Japanese market because now we’re in the stage where we have talents and we have merch. But in Japan we have talent, we have merch, and we have music. We have collaborations with convenience stores, you name it. So in the future, we would like to develop that.
Polygon: Do you have a dream collaboration in the U.S.? Would it be seeing Vtubers at McDonald’s or something along those lines?
Motoaki Tanigo: [We want] to do more collaborations in games, because in Japan, we did collaborations with Sega and Nintendo. In the U.S., we hope to have a chance to collaborate with big names like Riot Games.
Polygon: What has been the most important lesson Cover has learned as it expands talent to English speakers, and has this expansion brought any unique challenges?
Motoaki Tanigo: We have a good working environment for Japanese talent, but we still haven’t done the same thing for our English talent.
Max Sung Yoon Kim: On the American side, the streaming environments are very different. The kinds of things that a lot of the usual streamer streams, as well as what the audience enjoys, are different. This, as well as getting permissions for the games, [can be different]. There are a lot of environments surrounding streaming that are different from the Japan side.
Polygon: I’ve seen independent Vtubers here in the U.S. — who grew up in the American content creation ecosystem — say that sometimes Vtubing agencies can be a bit restrictive with the kinds of content they make. I was curious if Cover was trying to think through this challenge.
Motoaki Tanigo: We have so many choices, right? If you like being indie and being free, that’s also a really good option. But being in an agency, that means you can have more stage. You can access a bigger stage. You can be in a unit. You can be in concerts. You can be in movies, probably. So if you want to have a bigger stage in the future, I think being in the [agency] will be a better option for you.
Image: Gawr Gura/YouTube
Polygon: With Hololive Productions you’re creating characters, pop stars, gaming content creators, influencers, and more. Do you think that a successful Vtuber has to do it all? Or do you see opportunities for more niche talent to still find their voice?
Motoaki Tanigo: For me, viewers like people who do something really good, who do something their best, and they’re trying to bring this to their audience. We have gamers. We have entertainers, everything, right? Like, for example, in Japan, we have a talent who is really good in art, and that’s how she brands herself. But [the Vtuber industry is] really, really young. It’s been seven years. So there is so much potential in the future, and I think we should look forward to that.
Polygon: The expansion of your male cohort of Vtubers has been a bit slower. Why is it harder to sell male Vtubers?
Motoaki Tanigo: Our fans who are really into Holostars or into male Vtubers are mostly females in Asia. But when you take it to the American market, Western market, we have much more races, not just Asian. It’s really diverse. So how we market to many different races, many different ethnicities, is going to be our big challenge in the future.
Polygon: So the difference in the diversity presents more of a challenge when marketing the men of Holostars, then? Am I hearing that correctly?
Polygon: I remember scrolling through TikTok during the pandemic and seeing clips of Gawr Gura for the first time. What role do platforms like TikTok play in growing Cover?
Motoaki Tanigo: After the pandemic, instead of watching streaming and TikTok or other social media people, people tend to shift into user-generated content, like short videos, and this has been really big in Japan as well, so we’re trying to utilize that more in the future.
Max Sung Yoon Kim: It’s not just the importance of TikTok, but with our very highly engaged fans, it becomes another way for them to show support for our brand in a more convenient way. So I think that’s a very important part about our fandom as of how we have been growing so far, and that hopefully it will help to increase exposure.
Polygon: As we finish up the interview, I was wondering if there was anything else you would like to share with our readers?
Motoaki Tanigo: The Vtubing industry is new, but just like anime in the past few years, we have so many great IP coming from anime, right? So with that, with those anime having collaboration with games and industries, we are also looking forward to collaborating with many industries in the future.
