What we're going to see is a phasing out of personalities and their replacement with someone new more frequently. These streaming groups are still managed and coordinated through backrooms. The important thing for the parasocial relationship isn't the individual streamer, but the style of their content which quickly becomes a commodity as they employ more and more production staff.
This cultural commodity can now be farmed out en mass to create a bumper crop of similar content of which 99% will fizzle and die while one or two that match the ideological requirements succeed.
They'll either keep banning these retired personalities, or they'll kill them by pushing the new thing and driving them back to obscurity. We've already seen this happen a ton with some of the old New Media groups (Smosh, Vlog Brothers, Rhett and Link, Machinima, etc) where they either died or kinda disappeared from the limelight while absorbing new content into their ideological umbrella. I think all of those groups now own a huge number of channels through contracts and such. Except Machinima which I think actually exploded.
So you're imagining something like idol culture taking over? I could see that happening. Hololive is the current major successful one. I the old "new media groups" all failed because they still relied on some element of these individuals as major organisers and the organisational structure to self-perpetuate and bring up new icons was never constructed, once they aged up they got bored because they didn't need more money and never adapted to changing trends because they were comfortable just playing games.
I could see that happening but I have not yet seen a western company with the organisational capacity to not fizzle out. Eastern companies oriented around idol culture do much better with this.
What we're going to see is a phasing out of personalities and their replacement with someone new more frequently. These streaming groups are still managed and coordinated through backrooms. The important thing for the parasocial relationship isn't the individual streamer, but the style of their content which quickly becomes a commodity as they employ more and more production staff.
This cultural commodity can now be farmed out en mass to create a bumper crop of similar content of which 99% will fizzle and die while one or two that match the ideological requirements succeed.
They'll either keep banning these retired personalities, or they'll kill them by pushing the new thing and driving them back to obscurity. We've already seen this happen a ton with some of the old New Media groups (Smosh, Vlog Brothers, Rhett and Link, Machinima, etc) where they either died or kinda disappeared from the limelight while absorbing new content into their ideological umbrella. I think all of those groups now own a huge number of channels through contracts and such. Except Machinima which I think actually exploded.
So you're imagining something like idol culture taking over? I could see that happening. Hololive is the current major successful one. I the old "new media groups" all failed because they still relied on some element of these individuals as major organisers and the organisational structure to self-perpetuate and bring up new icons was never constructed, once they aged up they got bored because they didn't need more money and never adapted to changing trends because they were comfortable just playing games.
I could see that happening but I have not yet seen a western company with the organisational capacity to not fizzle out. Eastern companies oriented around idol culture do much better with this.