Naming and Marketing Yourself
Table of Contents
Finding a Name
Your VTuber name is also an important part of your identity and something you need to be thoughtful about. A common name can lead to you being buried in the search results; however, a name too complex will have users having trouble finding you as well.
Name Uniqueness
Be sure to search for your name combination on Google, Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, or whatever platform you intend on using to make sure it isn’t actively used by someone and that there aren’t millions of search results for it already.
For example, using a VTuber name generator, it gave me “SerenityScribe”, which brings to mind a chill poetry/writing-themed muse VTuber. However, when I search for “serenity scribe” on Google, I see that it has over 1,000,000 search results and is used by multiple social media accounts and businesses. Additionally, on YouTube, there weren’t as many relevant search results but the handle @SerenityScribe was taken, meaning you would have to use a different one. While it may not always be possible to get your preferred username/handle on every social media platform, it would be ideal if you could at least have most of them be consistent to help reduce impostors.
Name Clarity
Try keeping names easy to pronounce and spell. As to not put any particular VTuber on the spot, I’ll use a real-life non-VTuber example. For a while, I kept hearing an ad on the radio telling listeners to download the “Odyssey” app in order to listen to their favorite radio stations on their phones. I always thought that this was a pretty generic name and didn’t really make sense for the type of service they were providing. It wasn’t until more recently that I heard an updated ad where they actually spell out the name of the app: “Audacy”. Think of how many people like myself who may have misheard the name, went on Google to search for the “odyssey app”, not be able to immediately find what they were looking for, and gave up.
Marketing Yourself
Creating an Introduction
I’ve seen a lot of small indie VTubers not have a prepared introduction and I think it causes 2 issues: (1) it makes it really hard for them to market themselves when they have to come up with something on the spot and (2) introductions become less of an intro and more of a lore dump.
I’ve seen the latter a lot more in small indie VTuber collabs, where they go round robin and each VTuber introduction becomes “Hi, my name is Remy Ratatouille. I’m a chef rat VTuber who loves to cook and puppet. I work in secret at a failing French restaurant, where I help by fixing the chefs recipes.” These long-winded “intros” end up telling the viewers way more than they want to know about the character but nothing about you as a streamer.
When it comes to intros, they should be short, memorable, and most importantly, something that is uniquely you. For the first two, you can follow the KISS principle: “Keep It Simple, Stupid.”
I think a very good non-VTuber example is Spider-man. “Your friendly neighborhood Spider-man” highlights 2 of his major qualities without having to spell it out for you: (1) his more casual and approachable demeanor compared to other super heroes and (2) his locality and often community-focused efforts. In a similar vein, Hololive’s Hakos Baelz’s new intro tells you a lot about her personality as a streamer: she’s cringe.
However, not everything needs to be so meta. For example, Usana Pekora’s introduction is simply introduces herself as a member of Hololive’s 3rd generation and the Hololive ID talents vary from having a simple introduction and having a short catchphrase to having a more fleshed out intro.