If only Cube gave a portion of money they give on IDLE's comebacks, CLC would be mega.
I guess they are giving them part of the money of what they make with (G)I-DLE. From the interviews I read Soyeon is not that greedy and she gets relatively few money for her music production (they are often involved in things like music video or show concept, music production, music creation and writing, etc.) so they save a lot of money in this regard.They spend more money on dancers or nowadays on Music Videos, but they get a lot from major sponsor deals and since Queendom they never left the top 10 of brand reputation. they even topped (!) these Charts two times prior to Queendom and so get a lot of money from advertisement deals. There last album got nearly 120k sells, more than their previous albums combined, and two times of all CLC albums ever released in japan and korea combined (10)!!! They attracted a larger demographic and got a bigger fanbase resulting in them getting booked more often for concerts, advertisments, shows, etc. They invest more into (G)I-dle, because they get way more money out of (g)i-dle and because they need to invest way less in songwriting or concepts. They get paid so much more than what they invest in Idle and they get so much recognition resulting in more talents wanting to join Cube and more people wanting to invest in them.
I really like CLC and I am sad that the new share holders do not seem to care about them, but to be honest they really are not very profitable as a music group. They tried many concepts but CLC never got mega, u can blame it on wrong timing, on mismanagement or simply on the fact that the group constellation did not attract enough viewers or hardcore cheshires.
They are really talented nice girls but ultimately there were not enough people who wanted to see them for them to get bigger than they are.
At the start (G)I-DLE did get less or equal money for latata than CLC for black dress and more people loved (G)I-DLE. And they had very litte promotion at the beginnig, because noone seemed to be interested in cube anymore and cube did not have great fundings.
I'd even say without (G)I-DLE there would have been fewer comebacks for CLC last year. Cube is already investing a portion of the money they make on (G)I-DLE on CLC and it gave them their first win and highest sold album last year, but even that was not enough to make them mega. I guess nothing Cube could pull would make CLC mega at this point, the only possible thing would be a national hit like momolands boomboom and I doubt they could pull this off with CLC.