Hello everyone, and thanks for joining me once more on my blog, which, admittedly, hasn't been as weekly as planned. I've found it difficult to write about stuff as so many things have been going on behind the scenes, so I decided to stay quiet for the time being. However, it's clear we should address some concerns and talk about things.

Our goal has always been to maintain transparency, and I recognize that we haven't fully lived up to this commitment recently.

Before I start

Before I start, I want to touch on our top mission as a VTuber agency. Since idol was founded, our mission and priorities have shifted as we've learned and adapted to the industry. However, there was one thing that was always placed first, which eventually became the core of what makes idol the agency it is: we want to prioritize talents and their well-being, helping them find success.

From the way we auditioned to what we provided, we've always looked for talents with great potential whom we felt we could help. It was never about experience, background, or size.. we always chose talents who had a true spark and passion, and we wanted to be the ones to lend a hand and work with these types of people.

One a personal note, despite the challenges that come with my role, I couldn't be happier than to work at idol with our talents, who truly care about their craft, about idol, and put in more than they really have to.

The challenges

Of course, not everything always goes smoothly. In fact, recently we've learned the hard way that fast growth can sometimes be dangerous if not planned well, and we've found ourselves facing difficult challenges that lead to stress affecting everyone. This is why recently, we've chosen to take things slower, plan more in detail, and to avoid over-promising when resources are still limited.

We've also placed a lot of focus on growing the team, and with the addition of three new managers, we're hopeful we can bring things back to a pace we can handle while still pushing to do greater things.

I've apologized internally, but I would also like to take accountability and apologize publicly for any stress this has caused.

Donothons

I know some people have been waiting for Donothon prizes or have questions regarding goals not being met. Because idol is covering 100% of the costs of Donothon goals without much limitation, we did not consider our resources well and encountered challenges. As a result, we've created a new internal policy regarding Donothons, and we will be handling them much more quickly, with all goals being completed within 8-12 months from the event, and all prizes to top winners being sent out within 4 months of the event.

As for the current Donothons, we will publish a public Google Sheet later today, detailing clear timelines and deadlines for every single goal release, as well as information regarding the shipment of awards to the top tippers.

If you ever encounter issues with Donothons, we have also created a dedicated email address for support exclusively related to Donothons: donothon@idol-company.com

Merchandise

I understand how important merchandise is for fans (especially as someone who used to be a collector who spent way too much). As much as we wanted to get merchandise right from the start, we encountered a lot of unaccounted-for challenges that are mostly our fault, though the war in Israel did not help and created a lot of challenges that made that worse.

The merchandise will get shipped out, we are sorry about the delays. We expect deliveries to happen within Q1 of 2024, and we have opened a dedicated Twitter account for our store at https://twitter.com/idolcorp_store to update all the time regarding the status of products being shipped.

Because of these challenges, we will soon be outsourcing all of our merchandise production and operations to Brave group (more on that at the bottom) so that we will be able to focus on creating great content and supporting our talents while still being able to continue to push and create unique merchandise on a regular basis.

We know some people wonder about the release of additional merchandise when there's merchandise that hasn't been shipped, but it's important for us to continue to provide ways to support talents, and we don't want to miss out on important milestones and holidays to create unique merchandise that we know will get shipped eventually.

I would also like to offer full refunds to anyone who doesn't want to wait any longer. You can do that at any time at aviel@idol-company.com, and I will handle it for you.

Policy Changes

This is a weird one that keeps being brought back every now and then. I don't know where it originated, but I would like to make that very crystal clear. idol has been regularly updating internal policies for talents, most of it related to a safe work environment and technical stuff. The last time we updated our policy regarding stream content was in July, with the addition of a rule that excludes certain content from public streams, but not from member streams.

Other than that, our content policy has stayed the same since idol was founded, prioritizing content freedom while being mindful of YouTube's terms of service, and it will continue to be like that as far as I'm the CEO.

Brave group

As we announced, we have partnered with Brave group. They have released a great press release that I suggest you read here. I know this seemed to come out of nowhere, but we have been in touch with Brave group for a while now, and it was refreshing to see a corporation with shared values and a vision that is not afraid to invest in their own content and talents.

Our cooperation at the moment is focused on future content and projects, as well as outsourcing our merchandise production to their team. We are excited to continue working closely with them and are sure we can make this partnership mutually beneficial.

Before there's false speculation, this is just a partnership and not an acquisition, idol still is an independent corporation, and we retain full ownership of it and its direction.

In conclusion

This year has been a rollercoaster of emotions, but we genuinely believe this is just the beginning for us. We have so much more planned, we want to continue to innovate and push the industry to be better, and we aim to keep finding ways to be the best agency for our talents.

I'm extremely grateful for being able to do what I do, and I'm thankful for the amazing community that has formed around idol. We hope to learn from 2023 and make 2024 truly the year of idol.