Was NijiID really successful business-wise though? I know people talked about how they were dominating at the beginning when HoloID was still at their debut state, but I remember things a little differently. I'm quite sure that all of HoloID1 subcount exceeded every NijiID with the exception of Hana, who was already considered an outlier due to how popular she was with the EN-speaking group. I even remember specific scenarios where Riksa and Amicia tweeted about hitting their 10k subs milestone, something HoloID1 already achieved right after their debut.
It's not exactly the matter of numbers, but from my perspective as a local, NijiID was able to gain some ground early on by capitalizing the market and set up a decent foundation on the country while the vtubing there is still in its growing phase (I am not well-versed at this part, but to my knowledge, the vtubing in ID is still more of a curiosity with most of them only knowing Kizuna Ai and the notable ID vtuber back then is an indie named
Maya Putri and another named
Evelyn/Epel). They got the headstart and was able to gain some success, but they wasn't able to capitalize on that success beyond local collabs with conventions/anime events and that one big collab with a phone company for special Niji-ID themed phone.
I think that Nijisanji's tactic of
"a c c e l e r a t e" might backfired on their ID growth, leading to rather uneven subscriber numbers to the talents. Some of them were able to standout, some of them wasn't able so their growth is stunted. They also didn't able to capitalize the market during covid (HoloID and by extensions was able to snag this chance as well), which might the reason of them not being successful as they were before. Like, HoloID was able to bring enough charm to entice ID weebs with just three talents, while at that time NijiID has like, 3 gens and their number are heavily leaning toward what, one talent (Hana) while the rest either trailing behind or stuck with small subscribers.
That said... even with their inability of capitalizing their headstart for long-term profit, they does have quite number of loyal fans, either focusing on nijisanjis or liking both worlds (holo and niji or unity if you will), and the ID management was able to stay long enough to be profitable via these loyal fans and it probably more than enough for the main management to give enough incentive to open auditions, have enough resources to have up to 6 waves and doing local projects as best as they could along with convention guest appearances.
Alas, they got shuttered into main branch before we could know if they can survive long enough with fans loyalty. We probably would never know if their merge with main branch is due to KR fucked up so badly that they realized that foreign branch is bad in the long run, or the profits is just not enough to appease Riku's impatients nature. The merge helped nothing, since their staff is now barely noticeable and no one bothered to
actually give the Ex-ID something to do like projects or iunno, do something with the local market, so it's no surprise that everyone is walking out now.