Number can go up with notoriety if you have even one good talent connected to the brand you're signing on with.
I know indies that make more money than Brave Group girls but here's the thing, they don't get invited to events and have to scrape, claw and bleed for their numbers, far less so than they used to due to the mass exodus in 2024, indies just aren't popping up like that anymore, and I don't mean the successful ones with a five figure sub count, I mean just the 4 or even 3 digit sub counts.
"Successful" ones less so.
Even if you don't stay with a company when you jump ship some people will
still follow you, so you still have a net gain.
Tsunderia girls that haven't joined Phase Connect are still pulling decent numbers even if their channels aren't blowing up subscriber wise, with CCVs at 100+ a stream, I'm looking
right at
Amiya Aranha in particular when I say this. She's very tech savvy and a damn good streamer but without the notoriety of being apart of Tsunderia her momentum wouldn't have picked up like it did, even though a lot of people have long forgotten Tsunderia at this point except for maybe Phaseheads and a few True and Honest vtuber fans.
This girl now makes more money than she ever did in Tsunderia though I don't think she rakes it in, and I'm unsure if she does it full time or not but Tsunderia was so in the red it was unreal, and that's how it is for a lot of small to mid size corpos.... when we had them in the EN side.
I'm not counting Brave Group and it's many splinters if you do you're either new or disingenuous.
If you're not in entertainment being paid with exposure is just a meme but that's how people really do it and small to mid level indie corpos back when we had them this is how it was done.
The only small corpo I can really think of that hasn't been proven a scam/horrific to their talents
yet on the EN side is Variance Project, but they're really new, and we'll see what's in store soon, and with luck it'll be good or at the very least not bad.