VTuber Obake PAM exposes virtual star “Polar” better than one of the world’s largest news agencies

If you’ve been active on social media over the course of the last few days, you have doubtless stumbled across the story of virtual star “Polar”, a supposed REVOLUTION!! in online entertainment. The story was broken by international news agency Reuters in an article dated July 29, 2022, though it only gained any traction at the beginning of August thanks to a widely shared (and derided) tweet.

On top of that, the article’s URL suggests that it was only actually published on August 1, 2022. It’s a small detail — but one of many things that add up to make this whole story look a bit, as the kids say, sus.

For starters, the gushing praise heaped on Polar by Reuters makes absolutely no mention of other similar acts around the Internet. As a virtual musical star with green hair, Polar is most frequently compared to Crypton Future Media’s worldwide phenomenon and Vocaloid mascot Hatsune Miku, but more broadly her online entertainment work also crosses over somewhat with the world of VTubers. You’d think either of these things might be mentioned somewhere, but no.

VTuber Obake PAM, initially created as a mascot for popular online retailer Play-Asia but someone who quickly established herself as a talented, outspoken and fiercely independent entertainer, was suspicious. She was suspicious because, as the Reuters story says, Polar was suddenly in the news for having 1.6 million followers on TikTok and a YouTube channel with more than 500,000 subscribers — and yet no-one she had spoken to had ever heard of her or her work.

So she did some digging.

PAM discovered that Polar had her origins in the virtual world Avakin Life — though it was somewhat suspicious that using Avakin Life’s character creation tools it is not actually possible to create Polar’s character model. Her biggest successes have apparently been in the game’s annual Solar Sounds Festival, which supposedly attracts over 4 million visitors per year.

And yet that doesn’t explain why a virtual star with 1.6 million followers on TikTok and 500k subscribers on YouTube — figures that even well-established VTubers from agencies like Nijisanji would definitely be happy with — is completely unheard of by pretty much anyone who is normally tuned in to this sort of thing. You’d think, given the popularity and activity of the VTuber community online, someone would have stumbled across her at some point.

PAM noticed that Polar’s creation was credited to “TheSoul Publishing”. You might not know the name here, but you’ve almost certainly stumbled across some of their… work at some point, because they’re the creators of notorious channels such as 5 Minute Crafts and 123 GO!. These are “content farms” that are frequently treated with suspicion due to somehow having astronomical viewing figures despite spewing out the very worst kind of mindless garbage the Internet has to offer, and being widely mocked and derided.

If there’s one thing you can say for TheSoul Publishing, it’s that they know how to manipulate YouTube’s notorious algorithm — and it seems this is true for TikTok also. It’s hard to prove exactly what proportion of Polar’s supposed TikTok followers and YouTube subscribers are real and how many are bots, but given past performance of TheSoul Publishing, there is absolutely good reason to treat the whole situation with suspicion. Particularly since, as PAM points out, there is a significant inconsistency between how many people actually watch Polar’s videos on YouTube and how many subscribers she has.

PAM’s theory is that Polar’s videos have been pushed to a lot of people as ads. For the unfamiliar, YouTube features the ability for monetised video makers to “Promote” their videos for a fee, which effectively turns an entire YouTube video into an ad that is played before, during or after someone else’s work. If you’ve ever had an ASMR stream interrupted by a 30-minute discussion of Samsun Galaxy phones (hello!) then you’ll have stumbled across this before.

Now, as PAM points out, there’s nothing wrong with using this Promote feature as intended: to openly and honestly advertise. She stresses that Play-Asia and their frequent partner eastasiasoft often make use of this feature to highlight trailers and other announcements — and that she doesn’t have a problem with this. What she does have a problem with — quite rightly so — is this advertising system being used to artificially inflate Polar’s numbers, and provide the illusion of her having an audience that simply doesn’t exist.

It comes to something when the mascot of an online store (one best known to many of us as the place to go for pervy Switch games, among other things) is doing a better job at journalism than one of the largest, oldest and most well-established news agencies in the world. But that’s life in 2022, I guess.

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Pete Davison

Pete is Rice Digital's editor, and a proud champion of any and all games involving pretty girls hanging out, saving the world or both. His first waifu was Rit from Rod Land.

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