After the Novelty Wears Off
Virtual influencers do not enter every audience at the same psychological moment. A persona that once felt startling may later feel familiar, and that change can alter the balance between novelty and credibility. The focus here is the evidence for that category-level shift, so readers can use it as a planning hypothesis without mistaking a comparison of study periods for a guaranteed lifecycle of every persona or campaign.
From unusual object to familiar participant
The history of virtual influencers has two connected timelines. One is technological: early characters relied mainly on static or relatively fixed computer-generated designs, while later systems made digital identities more realistic, interactive, and adaptable. The other is interpretive: audiences and researchers moved from encountering a strange new form of endorser to asking whether such a persona could sustain trust, authenticity, and a relationship with followers.
The systematic review describes little dedicated research in the earliest period from 2016 to 2020, followed by a marked increase after 2020 and especially from 2022 through 2024. Early work tended to describe the existence and features of virtual personas. Later work increasingly examined anthropomorphism, source credibility, authenticity, human connection, interaction, and consumer behavior. That shift is more than a publication trend. It reflects a change in the problem that the category presents. When a synthetic identity is new, its existence can be the story. As synthetic identities become more common, existence is no longer enough to explain a response.
The category’s development also changes the meaning of attention. Novelty depends on contrast with what an audience has seen before. A first encounter with a computer-generated social endorser violates expectations about who can appear in a feed, speak in a personal voice, or collaborate with a brand. That violation can attract interest. Repeated exposure reduces the surprise, even if the persona remains visually polished. The identity may still be unusual in an absolute sense, but it is less unusual relative to the audience’s updated baseline.
This is the basic mechanism behind habituation. A stimulus that initially stands out can become part of the environment. The loss is not necessarily that the content becomes boring; it is that artificiality no longer supplies as much information about why the audience should pay attention. Once the audience recognizes the format, other questions become more important: Is the persona consistent? Is its recommendation credible? Does its behavior make sense? Is the relationship transparent? What does it know about the product, and who is responsible for what it says?
The meta-analysis tests this possibility by dividing the evidence into an earlier period—studies published in 2022 or before—and a recent period—studies published after 2022. This is not a measure of how many times any one consumer encountered a specific account. It is a way to ask whether the relationships observed in earlier research differ from those observed in more recent research as the category and its surrounding technology developed.
The answer is directionally consistent with a shift from novelty toward credibility. The path from the virtual-influencer condition to novelty is 0.581 in the earlier period and 0.197 in the recent period.