Livestreaming by VTubers -- animated 2D/3D avatars controlled by real individuals -- have recently garnered substantial global followings and achieved significant monetary success. Despite prior research highlighting the importance of realism in audience engagement, VTubers deliberately conceal their identities, cultivating dedicated fan communities through virtual personas. While previous studies underscore that building a core fan community is essential to a streamer's success, we lack an understanding of the characteristics of viewers of this new type of streamer. Gaining a deeper insight into these viewers is critical for VTubers to enhance audience engagement, foster a more robust fan base, and attract a larger viewership. To address this gap, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of VTuber viewers on Bilibili, a leading livestreaming platform where nearly all VTubers in China stream. By compiling a first-of-its-kind dataset covering 2.7M livestreaming sessions, we investigate the characteristics, engagement patterns, and influence of VTuber viewers. Our research yields several valuable insights, which we then leverage to develop a tool to "recommend" future subscribers to VTubers. By reversing the typical approach of recommending streams to viewers, this tool assists VTubers in pinpointing potential future fans to pay more attention to, and thereby effectively growing their fan community.

翻译：VTuber（由真人操控的2D/3D动画形象）直播近年来在全球范围内获得了大量追随者并取得了显著的经济成功。尽管先前研究强调了真实感在观众参与中的重要性，VTuber却刻意隐藏其真实身份，通过虚拟形象培育专属的粉丝社群。虽然已有研究指出构建核心粉丝社群对主播的成功至关重要，但我们对这类新型主播的观众特征仍缺乏了解。深入理解这些观众对于VTuber提升观众参与度、培育更稳固的粉丝基础以及吸引更广泛受众至关重要。为填补这一空白，我们对中国主要直播平台Bilibili（几乎所有中国VTuber均在此平台直播）上的VTuber观众进行了全面分析。通过构建首个覆盖270万场直播会话的数据集，我们研究了VTuber观众的特征、参与模式及其影响力。本研究获得了多项有价值的发现，并据此开发了一款为VTuber"推荐"潜在订阅者的工具。该工具通过逆转传统的"向观众推荐直播"模式，帮助VTuber精准定位值得重点关注的潜在未来粉丝，从而有效拓展其粉丝社群。