How Many Virtual Celebrities Are There?

Virtual Celebrity Fun Facts & Statistics

Have you ever heard of Kizuna AI and Lil Miquela? If so, you would know about Virtual Celebrities! Virtual Celebrities — so-called virtual YouTubers or virtual influencers — seem pretty much like existing YouTubers and Influencers. They will live stream or upload daily postings on SNS. Except that they are not real but pure 3D graphics.

As virtual celebrities gain global popularity, we started to wonder from when they started and how many there are. These questions led us to dive deep to research the trends and found out the unexpectedly vibrant ecosystem and insightful data about virtual celebrities. In this article, we want to share our research, raw data*, and insights in hopes that you will understand the virtual celebrity industry better.

*We collected/listed virtual celebrities, their subscribers, companies, channel info, related tech solutions, and visualized/categorized data. Our raw data page is available here.

Edit(Aug 24th, 2020): Along with the researches, we finally released an avatar video-chat/streaming app for potential VTubers! Currently, the app, Hyprmeet, is free to download as a beta app so check it out and let us how you think.

It contains a built-in avatar customizing tool, a virtual webcam feature for streaming/video call software such as OBS/Discord/Zoom, and our real-time facial mocap technology. We are planning to add more features such as VRoid 3D model support, button-triggered animation, etc. so stay tuned!

From When Virtual Celebrities Started?

Let’s take a look at the keywords trends related to virtual celebrities from Google Trends — Virtual YouTuber, VTuber, Kizuna AI(キズナアイ), and Lil Miquela. The search has been activated and keeps the traffic level consistently from since early 2018 till current worldwide.