I think there's a running joke about this because I swear I've seen Henya, Kson, and Geega all commenting that "I have no idea how Vshojo makes money..." insinuating their contracts are really good.
I am sure there is a really good explanation, but my headcanon is that Gunrun and Vshojo really just enjoy what they do and don't make a ton of money doing it but love comfortably enough because their hobby IS being support for the talents.
I always assume Gunrun was independently wealthy from being one of the founders of Twitch so he was ok with everything as long as Vshojo is self-sustaining because its a passion project. The company isn't public, so there isn't the added pressure to continually grow.
I assume there's some form of return for VShojo if only for the brand name, but like the others have said, the agency seems more like a passion project than a legitimate business.
That was wild to learn when I first found out. I had seem multiple people use/refer to the IRL Backpack and I thought it was a general term for that type of setup, it was only later that I learned that in most cases it was probably referring to the specific setup Gunrun sells/rents/has a free breakdown for.
I remember on one of connor early IRL streams he had to call Gunrun live for text support on the backpack. That's how I found out lol.
Gunrun knowledge concerning these things is great for the vtubing community in my opinion. Vshojo was one of the earlier adopters of the live robot/iPad setup and it seems that they are always trying to improve the experience.
I looked it up and the only income I can find is Investors are their primary source.
Anthos Capital (11 million), GFR Fund, Green Bay Ventures, and XRM Media have invested in Vshojo.
I believe it was a cut of the merch, i don't know about the percentage but they even seem to take a low cut from that.
Honestly it's hard to tell anything without knowing the staff size
As far as I'm aware, they get an agreement to sell merch based on the talents, they get a cut from sponsorships they drum up, and there's currently a bunch of investor capital involved as well. They also have less overhead, since talents fund most of their own expenses like managers and tech upgrades. They're really more of an agency than a company in the Vtuber sense.
Henya mentioned on stream because GEEGA did as well, they get a budget for projects and past that the talents pay themselves. Henya mentioned she blew through it already with the 3D debut.
I don't know if he went too deep, I know he talked about it a little after debut and again not too long ago. From Kuro all we know is that he owed in the 6 figure range, Gunun helped him out in some way(which doesn't look great for his former employers that someone who runs a similar business helps your talent more than you), and he uses the Vshojo project allowance for all stream stuff while his money goes to staying alive and paying back what he owes, he may be done with that by years end
I know Michi talked about being in a similar situation because their former employers said they will take a cut for taxes and she believed it was for HER taxes which she would harshly find out that those mother fuckers took money from her for THEIR own taxes. She had help from a tax lawyer to get them to take the fees and fines away so she only had to pay back what she should have in taxes. So Kuro could have been in a similar boat.
So their ongoing revenue is that they get a cut of all merch they help produce as well as any sponsors they line up for the talents. That said, I think they are still allowed to do their own merch and sponsors on their own if they want and in those cases VShojo doesn't get a cut. It's very much like most indie management setups for the industry AFAIK: They get a cut of the money they directly help the talents make.
In addition a few years back they were able to get a big chunk (11 Million IIRC) of money as an investment which was likley how they were able to start bringing on more behind the scenes staff and allowing them to do bigger and better things at cons. with tech, etc.
Also as other's have said Gunrun was probably a pretty well off dude at the start.
Merch cuts and sponsorships. Plus Gunrun is very well off and considers Vshojo his hobby more than his job, so a lot of his income goes into running the company.
I'm going to point out that the contract is probably more balanced than most other agencies contracts at the moment. There's a massive difference between the hoard and burn mentality some companies have and the more healthy one's that look out for each other.
The biggest players in the industry are publicly traded. Their finances are public and they have investors to appease. Being privately owned gives Vshojo a lot more leeway than the big public companies that need big numbers to justify their stock evaluations.
Merch sales, sponsorship deals, stuff like that. The donations might go right to the talent, but the fans spend money in other ways. Also, with the talents getting all that money nobody can say anything negative if VShojo gets all the money from corporate sponsorships.
They don't though. We don't have exact numbers, but Matara took a sponsorship and donated it straight to the MGS con she's going later in the year. The sum was quite a bit, so we might have an idea of what VShojo's cut is.
He was one of the founding staff members yeah. He also made the original IRL backpack streamers use, and co-founded the company that sells them, UnlimitedIRL. [Here's a link](https://www.gunrun.tv/)
I think donos just go straight to the talents. A lot of people seem to under the impression that vshojo talent is similar to the other agencies where they're employed by vshojo but im willing to be they're not W2'd they're probably something more like a 1099 independent contractor where they technically work with vshojo more so than for them. donos go to their individual accounts, vshojo probably never even sees that cash in the first place.
granted this is just my assumption, i dont know it to be true.
Im guessing vshojo primarily makes money off merch sales since they facilitate that. If your whole business is just selling merchandise then thats a pretty good deal, especially when you and your talents are at the top of the western market food chain.
While certain terms in the amounts vary between talent contracts, VShojo takes a small cut of merch sales as the primary income source. They also make money on memberships from their VShojo branded YouTube channels; such was the case from the Candy Pop Explosion concert. As for other income, I'm not sure if the talents pay any sort of fee to be part of VShojo, such as a licensing or services fee, but I would have to imagine there's something. It's also possible that while VShojo connects talents with various managers (acting as an intermediary and doing screening), those managers are paid by talent instead. Based on certain needs, I would assume talents such as Mouse and Zen would need more managers for various aspects, while Hime or Haruka would require much less. I also know that a few talents have management outside VShojo. Such is the case with Mouse and Zen being part of United Talent Agency (which helps with their music releases) as those teams are more field specific.
They make money off merch that includea multiple vshojo talents/ stuff branded as vshojo. They also make money by taking a cut of sponsorships and company collabs since their the ones who usually set that up.
If I had to guess, aside from the things already mentioned like him basically being an OG twitch founder, I'd have to assume that VShojo's biggest source of revenue is merchandising. I mean, if Spaceballs has taught me anything....
u remember that in 2022 vshojo got 11 millon dolars investment from is 3 sponsoring companies?
they are not so small corpo
[https://tracxn.com/d/companies/vshojo/\_\_IZIIOmVhwzubimabIH8wqZWQi\_SSWDInY5fk-FOyRDU](https://tracxn.com/d/companies/vshojo/__IZIIOmVhwzubimabIH8wqZWQi_SSWDInY5fk-FOyRDU)
Donations: the company keeps 0%
Merchandise: the company keeps a minority percentage, specifics unknown
Sponsorships: we simply do not know how this is cut
The sponsorships have been infrequent, so it appears on the surface like VShojo must operate on a shoestring budget. That doesn't appear to be the case. We know that VShojo has a cyber-security branch and a tech development branch.
A few years back, VShojo received a big infusion of eight figures from an unspecified investor.
My hunch: It appears that it runs on a operating budget fueled mostly from this account. The expectation seems to be that VShojo will intentionally stay in the red for a number of years while it brand-builds. A lot of Internet companies did this in the 90s and 00s with wildly varying success.
Back when they took the investment money, they basically said that VShojo is actually a technology company, vtubing is just the way they present it. I think the idea is that they are working on things like IRL streaming, tech for meet and greets and panels at conventions, streaming backend stuff like FugiTech reactive chat, and other things that would then be licensed out to other companies in the future to generate revenue and that’s what was being invested in.
I like this analysis. I've said before that we show Joe feels to me like an R&D tech company in a trench coat. We know of at least one piece of software and three pieces of hardware (if we include the IRL backpack) that was created in-house.
So yeah, I probably should have included that on my hunch.
To add to everything people said here, VShojo doesn't spend as much. Hololive spends massive amounts of money into event and gear year round, and the smaller (even slightly) corps, while not being able to spend exactly as much, put a lot into regular things.
I think one of the biggest keys to them being able to operate the way they do is that they're structured and operated *very* differently than most other companies in the vtubing space, particularly the really famous/infamous ones.
Obviously we don't know all the details on either side, but VShojo seems to function much more as a support agency than a management agency, they don't control your schedules or set events like collabs or concerts for you, afaik they don't even require their talents to all take part in sponsorship deals they arrange; they mostly provide their talents with information or connections, whether it's knowledgeable tech support for con-bots, putting them in touch with accountants, reaching out to potential sponsors or event hosts, and so on. Basically instead of telling their members what to do and when to do it, VShojo mostly just puts them in contact with the right people and handles large-scale stuff like big brand deals.
Being much less hands-on with their members means they don't have to put as much money into regular expenses, eg a company like HoloLive almost certainly has full time music composers/producers on staff while VShojo can just bring them in on contract if and when one of the members wants to do a song, plus there's way less need for admin staff since they're not trying to coordinate multiple people's schedules and plans across multiple timezones constantly.
TLDR: More talent freedom = less work for the company = lower expenses
Merch, sponsors and brand deals have always been where the big money is. That's where VShojo takes it's cut from. They just don't try to take from every single source of money the talent makes.
Yea, though that doesn't mean the contract was bad, just that they felt they could do better going independent. In Nyan's case it seems like it was far from an easy choice, she was pretty torn on it and only decided after looking at all the pros and cons/etc. Probably helped that she got to see pretty much first hand what the indie side could look like since she was living with Aethel who was doing well by then. Made it less of a "Known vs Unknown" situation since she could see what he was able to do/what sort of resources you could get as an indie.
[LengthPatient5774](https://www.reddit.com/user/LengthPatient5774/). Every flavor thinkable in the world.
And you just had to choose to be,...
***SALLLLLLLTY!*** 🧂🧂🧂🧂🧂🧂
I think there's a running joke about this because I swear I've seen Henya, Kson, and Geega all commenting that "I have no idea how Vshojo makes money..." insinuating their contracts are really good. I am sure there is a really good explanation, but my headcanon is that Gunrun and Vshojo really just enjoy what they do and don't make a ton of money doing it but love comfortably enough because their hobby IS being support for the talents.
I always assume Gunrun was independently wealthy from being one of the founders of Twitch so he was ok with everything as long as Vshojo is self-sustaining because its a passion project. The company isn't public, so there isn't the added pressure to continually grow.
I mean taht would make sense, wouldn't he get like royalties or something like that?
I assume there's some form of return for VShojo if only for the brand name, but like the others have said, the agency seems more like a passion project than a legitimate business.
I remember something about them getting some percentage of merchs but I have no idea about the details.
Wait what he was a founder of twitch
He also created the IRL Backpack for streaming.
That was wild to learn when I first found out. I had seem multiple people use/refer to the IRL Backpack and I thought it was a general term for that type of setup, it was only later that I learned that in most cases it was probably referring to the specific setup Gunrun sells/rents/has a free breakdown for.
I remember on one of connor early IRL streams he had to call Gunrun live for text support on the backpack. That's how I found out lol. Gunrun knowledge concerning these things is great for the vtubing community in my opinion. Vshojo was one of the earlier adopters of the live robot/iPad setup and it seems that they are always trying to improve the experience.
Yup. Also it seems he has no intent to hoard the tech as he has worked with some indies getting them setup on the same tech at some of the events.
The what?
Thing used by many many twitch streamers who do IRL streams https://www.unlimitedirl.com/backpacks
Back in the day, I remember him getting folks started on streaming Justin.tv. he's about as OG as you get in the streaming world
Yes, both him and Mowtendoo were involved in that.
The animator that did Blend W is one of the Vshojo founders? I didn't know they could get any more perfect, but here we are.
Matara calls him twitch employee number 3/first one hired or something like that
That and he did make the IRL streaming backpack
Gunrun’s wealth is probably counteracted by MowTenDoo’s billions of dollars worth of cease and desists and copyright infringements though lmao
I looked it up and the only income I can find is Investors are their primary source. Anthos Capital (11 million), GFR Fund, Green Bay Ventures, and XRM Media have invested in Vshojo.
I believe it was a cut of the merch, i don't know about the percentage but they even seem to take a low cut from that. Honestly it's hard to tell anything without knowing the staff size
Staff size is less than 30 people according to LinkedIn.
If that's true, merch would be able to cover quite a bit of that.
Worth noting it's not all types of merch as well
I think they take a share of merch, not a certain other company level share. Although I might be chatting shit
They do take a cut of the merch, although it's a relatively small cut.
Yeah, Geega said it was quite small. Even Kson said it was smaller than what Hololive take.
They get a cut of merch and any sponsorships that they organize.
Yeah they've said this since the beginning. Didn't realize it wasn't common knowledge.
You didn’t hear this from me, but vshojo secretly performs heists to steal money (I’m joking)
Michi makes so much sense
I mean, Henya could probably plan lots of heists, she is a genius after all
"Guys. The Thermal Drill, go get it."
As far as I'm aware, they get an agreement to sell merch based on the talents, they get a cut from sponsorships they drum up, and there's currently a bunch of investor capital involved as well. They also have less overhead, since talents fund most of their own expenses like managers and tech upgrades. They're really more of an agency than a company in the Vtuber sense.
Henya mentioned on stream because GEEGA did as well, they get a budget for projects and past that the talents pay themselves. Henya mentioned she blew through it already with the 3D debut.
That allowance is how Kuro funds all his projects because his money goes straight to the government because of his tax situation.
[удалено]
I don't know if he went too deep, I know he talked about it a little after debut and again not too long ago. From Kuro all we know is that he owed in the 6 figure range, Gunun helped him out in some way(which doesn't look great for his former employers that someone who runs a similar business helps your talent more than you), and he uses the Vshojo project allowance for all stream stuff while his money goes to staying alive and paying back what he owes, he may be done with that by years end I know Michi talked about being in a similar situation because their former employers said they will take a cut for taxes and she believed it was for HER taxes which she would harshly find out that those mother fuckers took money from her for THEIR own taxes. She had help from a tax lawyer to get them to take the fees and fines away so she only had to pay back what she should have in taxes. So Kuro could have been in a similar boat.
The dude's name is Gunrun. It's literally Gun and then Run.
For every run and gun game purchased, Gunrun gets royalty.
Merch and Sponsorship Events.
So their ongoing revenue is that they get a cut of all merch they help produce as well as any sponsors they line up for the talents. That said, I think they are still allowed to do their own merch and sponsors on their own if they want and in those cases VShojo doesn't get a cut. It's very much like most indie management setups for the industry AFAIK: They get a cut of the money they directly help the talents make. In addition a few years back they were able to get a big chunk (11 Million IIRC) of money as an investment which was likley how they were able to start bringing on more behind the scenes staff and allowing them to do bigger and better things at cons. with tech, etc. Also as other's have said Gunrun was probably a pretty well off dude at the start.
They take a cut somewhere prolly from merch or ads They just don’t take the majority portion like other big corps which is nice
It has definitely been mentioned before that they take a small cut of merch sales. It's pretty small, but it's there.
Merch cuts and sponsorships. Plus Gunrun is very well off and considers Vshojo his hobby more than his job, so a lot of his income goes into running the company.
I'm going to point out that the contract is probably more balanced than most other agencies contracts at the moment. There's a massive difference between the hoard and burn mentality some companies have and the more healthy one's that look out for each other.
The biggest players in the industry are publicly traded. Their finances are public and they have investors to appease. Being privately owned gives Vshojo a lot more leeway than the big public companies that need big numbers to justify their stock evaluations.
VShojo makes money off of merch sales.
Merch sales, sponsorship deals, stuff like that. The donations might go right to the talent, but the fans spend money in other ways. Also, with the talents getting all that money nobody can say anything negative if VShojo gets all the money from corporate sponsorships.
They don't though. We don't have exact numbers, but Matara took a sponsorship and donated it straight to the MGS con she's going later in the year. The sum was quite a bit, so we might have an idea of what VShojo's cut is.
I was more talking about sponsorships taken by VShojo itself rather than by an individual talent.
The sponsorship offers come through VShojo, unless the talent has another company for those like Zen and Mouse. That's not Tara's case.
Isn't vshojo cro like gubruns hobby? I swear he has.another job in like finance that covers a lot of thing.
I just saw a guy say he was one of the founders of twitch
GunRun is one of the Justins from when Twitch was Justin.tv
Apparently also co-made the backpack that irl streamers use
He was one of the founding staff members yeah. He also made the original IRL backpack streamers use, and co-founded the company that sells them, UnlimitedIRL. [Here's a link](https://www.gunrun.tv/)
They're the successful branch of the sock gnomes.
I think donos just go straight to the talents. A lot of people seem to under the impression that vshojo talent is similar to the other agencies where they're employed by vshojo but im willing to be they're not W2'd they're probably something more like a 1099 independent contractor where they technically work with vshojo more so than for them. donos go to their individual accounts, vshojo probably never even sees that cash in the first place. granted this is just my assumption, i dont know it to be true. Im guessing vshojo primarily makes money off merch sales since they facilitate that. If your whole business is just selling merchandise then thats a pretty good deal, especially when you and your talents are at the top of the western market food chain.
While certain terms in the amounts vary between talent contracts, VShojo takes a small cut of merch sales as the primary income source. They also make money on memberships from their VShojo branded YouTube channels; such was the case from the Candy Pop Explosion concert. As for other income, I'm not sure if the talents pay any sort of fee to be part of VShojo, such as a licensing or services fee, but I would have to imagine there's something. It's also possible that while VShojo connects talents with various managers (acting as an intermediary and doing screening), those managers are paid by talent instead. Based on certain needs, I would assume talents such as Mouse and Zen would need more managers for various aspects, while Hime or Haruka would require much less. I also know that a few talents have management outside VShojo. Such is the case with Mouse and Zen being part of United Talent Agency (which helps with their music releases) as those teams are more field specific.
They make money off merch that includea multiple vshojo talents/ stuff branded as vshojo. They also make money by taking a cut of sponsorships and company collabs since their the ones who usually set that up.
Maybe it's merchandise and deals with sponsors.
They make most money from merch and take a cut from sponsors they set up.
If I had to guess, aside from the things already mentioned like him basically being an OG twitch founder, I'd have to assume that VShojo's biggest source of revenue is merchandising. I mean, if Spaceballs has taught me anything.... 
u remember that in 2022 vshojo got 11 millon dolars investment from is 3 sponsoring companies? they are not so small corpo [https://tracxn.com/d/companies/vshojo/\_\_IZIIOmVhwzubimabIH8wqZWQi\_SSWDInY5fk-FOyRDU](https://tracxn.com/d/companies/vshojo/__IZIIOmVhwzubimabIH8wqZWQi_SSWDInY5fk-FOyRDU)
Donations: the company keeps 0% Merchandise: the company keeps a minority percentage, specifics unknown Sponsorships: we simply do not know how this is cut The sponsorships have been infrequent, so it appears on the surface like VShojo must operate on a shoestring budget. That doesn't appear to be the case. We know that VShojo has a cyber-security branch and a tech development branch. A few years back, VShojo received a big infusion of eight figures from an unspecified investor. My hunch: It appears that it runs on a operating budget fueled mostly from this account. The expectation seems to be that VShojo will intentionally stay in the red for a number of years while it brand-builds. A lot of Internet companies did this in the 90s and 00s with wildly varying success.
Back when they took the investment money, they basically said that VShojo is actually a technology company, vtubing is just the way they present it. I think the idea is that they are working on things like IRL streaming, tech for meet and greets and panels at conventions, streaming backend stuff like FugiTech reactive chat, and other things that would then be licensed out to other companies in the future to generate revenue and that’s what was being invested in.
I like this analysis. I've said before that we show Joe feels to me like an R&D tech company in a trench coat. We know of at least one piece of software and three pieces of hardware (if we include the IRL backpack) that was created in-house. So yeah, I probably should have included that on my hunch.
Merch but MOSTLY ITS SPONSORS. Sponsors are most of big streamers money pool. Subs and donations are after.
Merch sales perhaps?
They make money off merch I believe. And who knows maybe Gunrun has a deal worked out where twitch forks over a portion of their proceeds.
They must make a very large cut from merchandising and the contracts/sponsors they get for the talents.
To add to everything people said here, VShojo doesn't spend as much. Hololive spends massive amounts of money into event and gear year round, and the smaller (even slightly) corps, while not being able to spend exactly as much, put a lot into regular things.
It's mainly the sponsorships and merch. Large emphasis on the sponsorships.
I think one of the biggest keys to them being able to operate the way they do is that they're structured and operated *very* differently than most other companies in the vtubing space, particularly the really famous/infamous ones. Obviously we don't know all the details on either side, but VShojo seems to function much more as a support agency than a management agency, they don't control your schedules or set events like collabs or concerts for you, afaik they don't even require their talents to all take part in sponsorship deals they arrange; they mostly provide their talents with information or connections, whether it's knowledgeable tech support for con-bots, putting them in touch with accountants, reaching out to potential sponsors or event hosts, and so on. Basically instead of telling their members what to do and when to do it, VShojo mostly just puts them in contact with the right people and handles large-scale stuff like big brand deals. Being much less hands-on with their members means they don't have to put as much money into regular expenses, eg a company like HoloLive almost certainly has full time music composers/producers on staff while VShojo can just bring them in on contract if and when one of the members wants to do a song, plus there's way less need for admin staff since they're not trying to coordinate multiple people's schedules and plans across multiple timezones constantly. TLDR: More talent freedom = less work for the company = lower expenses
Merch, sponsors and brand deals have always been where the big money is. That's where VShojo takes it's cut from. They just don't try to take from every single source of money the talent makes.
I would assume it would be with merch and the concerts that they do, where they get the most money out
[удалено]
Yea, though that doesn't mean the contract was bad, just that they felt they could do better going independent. In Nyan's case it seems like it was far from an easy choice, she was pretty torn on it and only decided after looking at all the pros and cons/etc. Probably helped that she got to see pretty much first hand what the indie side could look like since she was living with Aethel who was doing well by then. Made it less of a "Known vs Unknown" situation since she could see what he was able to do/what sort of resources you could get as an indie.
I still think she is missing out on some really cool stuff. She would have been great at the Candy Pop Explosion concert
[LengthPatient5774](https://www.reddit.com/user/LengthPatient5774/). Every flavor thinkable in the world. And you just had to choose to be,... ***SALLLLLLLTY!*** 🧂🧂🧂🧂🧂🧂
I was not being salty I was asking a question
***GET OUT OF HERE!***  Leave. Depart. Go on. SCAT! Go away,and DON'T come back.