Admittedly she was one of the prominent members of the Kizuna AI. gang upd8. Though I agree, I'd be surprised she would have earned anywhere near a 100 million yen. And even listening to someone who did, Coco, said she was absolutely shocked at the amount of taxes she had to pay when everything was said and done. So the 10's of millions Polka is talking about could have easily become something like 80k$. This is someone who, from what it sounds like, lives in a cramp appartement, used a single monitor until fairly recently, and also goes to a cobbler to get her (40-50ish $) shoes fixed instead of buying a new pair.
Plus, the way she describes her work ethic sounds absolutely miserable. 20 hours editing a single video. She still sometimes does that now at Hololive, like the recording of her unpacking stuff and then her commenting over it or the prerecorded concert. But definitely to a lesser extent.
On the one hand, I could see an entertainer trying to seem poor to keep relatable to their fans. On the other, we also know of tons of youtubers who try to seem way richer than they are too.
If you take a superchat gross of 1,000,000 yen:
- youtube 30% off the top: 700,000
- split 50/50 with cover: 350,000
- Income tax of 23% + prefectural taxes of ~10%:: 234,000
so for every million yen of superchat, the girls take home about $2300. I remember poor Noel also mentioned she had a rude awakening learning about "estimated taxes" (in japan and the US you are actually supposed to pay taxes quarterly, but 90% of people don't know this because the automatic paycheck witholding done by their employer covers the majority of their tax bill).
This math does lend some credence to some of the stuff that she mentioned in the article, that superchat seems like an inefficient way to earn income. We don't know what the base salary of the girls is, and what they earn from merch, membership, adsense, but it may explain why so many of them operate secondary channels.
If anything it suggests the hologirls must not care too much about superchats, since they're labor intensive (time spent reading/reacting), potentially dangerous, and probably only get paid out to them in intervals.
If you do the same math for a VOMS girl like Pikamee who gets to keep all her superchats:
- youtube 30% off the top: 700,000
- Income tax of 23% + prefectural taxes of ~10%:: 539,000
Pikamee would then earn ~$5390 of every million yen superchat at her. We of course don't know if different girls/gens have negotiated different rates with hololive, but most other examples of envelope math I can find come to around the same numbers. These numbers would shift around a bit if you actually properly applied the marginal tax rates instead of lopping off the top like I'm doing. Plus there's a really bullshit seeming ~5% self employment tax that I'm not sure how it gets applied to girls with two channels (e.g., 5% flat off their total yearly income, or 5% off of the gross of their self employment? I assume the latter).
There's no question these girls have big hustle and are probably not hurting for cash because they're young, pretty, and talented. Just remember that next time you're about to superchat 500$ at them to say "kusa".
EDIT: More autistic math figuring
We know that many of the girls live in Tokyo, so we can probably use the cost of living there as a "sanity check" vs any calculations we do.
A shitty apartment in tokyo can be had for ~700$/month. Japanese renting is notoriously weird and strict, and most landlords aren't going to rent to you if your income is not high enough. If we assume they enforce the 30% rule, that means the girls would have to earn at least 28,000$ to rent anything at all. This number of course changes if parents are willing to co-sign leases. We can further refine our estimate if we know for sure if a particular girl has a one or two bedroom apartment by using the median rent for that size of apartment.
For example, a 2-bedroom apartment is ~1,900$/month (lets knock it down to 1500, the girls work from home and are likely not as location sensitive), meaning a girl living alone in a 2BR would need to be earning 60,000$/yr to secure her lease.
If we knew what the holohouse rent was, we might be able to take a reasonable stab at Rushia's paper income, because I recall hearing her application was denied. I could see it being because her stated income was slightly too small for a high end landlord to feel comfortable renting a nice place to her.
