A Day After Hitting 1.07 Million Subscribers, Kawasaki Sui Talks Growth for Four Hours

INDEPENDENT — Kawasaki Sui, whose channel passed 1.07 million subscribers the day before, opened a four-hour late-night chat stream on Sunday by putting the live subscriber count on screen. She thanked the viewers who sent Super Chats and memberships, and said that at the current pace the channel would reach 1.1 million around next August, when she plans to celebrate. She said she cares less about the subscriber total than about concurrent viewers and members, the fans she called her “true” ones.

She walked through how the number moves. On a good day the channel gains as many as 200 subscribers and on a bad one it loses as many as 300, she said, averaging about 100 a day, and she said it would lose roughly 2,000 a month if she stopped buying ads. She said her ad spending goes mostly overseas because the same effort costs about three times as much at home. Her stated goal for the month was to clear 200 concurrent viewers on every stream, and she said she planned to be aggressive through November and December.

“A VTuber has only one way to lose: quitting.” — Kawasaki Sui, on not giving up

Much of the early talk was about a video she posted at 3 p.m. that day, a review of an Amazon-brand cola zero. She said it had passed 4,000 views during the stream and was pulling about 1.5 times the views of her recent videos, and that she could not say why it had taken off. She described a mix of three daily slots, videos at 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. and the stream at 11 p.m., that she said would run through Nov. 4, and explained that she fixes the stream start at 11 p.m. because a crowd arriving at the opening is said to help a stream grow.

Viewers played Othello against a program by typing moves into chat, and she said a viewer beat its strongest level near the three-hour mark. The conversation also took in movies, manga about creative work, the idea of scolding someone, and her own views on marriage and growing up. A viewer preparing for a job interview asked for encouragement, and she told them to answer “I can do it” when asked whether they could. Chat answered in kind, and she later said that a VTuber has only one way to lose, which is to quit, a line she said she had also written in a book. The stream drew 51 paid messages, Super Chats and stickers combined.

She closed at about 3 a.m., saying she wants to keep streams to roughly four hours, from 11 p.m. to 3 a.m. Her next stream, she said, would be Saga Frontier 2, and she asked viewers to arrive at 11 p.m. sharp.