Also while it’s on my mind, I wanted to write down stuff from a really interesting panel I went to at the con, run by a guy who does anime market research and marketing strategy, about the data behind anime viewership and revenue. I think it’s especially interesting coming on the heels of the Crunchyroll Anime Awards and the discussions I've seen around it (mostly around not being happy with the winners).
I wasn’t taking notes during it, but this is what I remember to the best of my ability; apologies if there are any inaccuracies:
At this point there is more money coming into animanga from overseas markets than from domestic (i.e., Japanese) markets. Companies are aware that for something to get really financially successful, it has to appeal to international audiences.
And most of that overseas money comes from subscriptions to streaming services. Merch / purchase of physical copies / etc make up only a small % of revenue.
Shonen and isekai outperform everything else to a huge extent. So there continue to be lots of these produced.
About half of all recent/current anime views are going to just a few (like, a single digit # of) series. I believe it was: Solo Leveling, Sakamoto Days, Dan Da Dan, Gachiakuta, MHA, and (I think) JJK. Also Solo Leveling by itself gets far more than any other series.
Quote: "Statistically, if your favorite anime from the last year wasn’t one of these, then no one watched your favorite anime"
Note that these are all shonen (except technically Solo Leveling since the original material is manhwa, not manga, but close enough)
Don’t be surprised that these are the series winning awards, even if you don’t think they hold a candle to [insert your favorite anime here] — there’s just so many more people watching these that it’s virtually impossible for any other series to win.
The only series in the recent top 20 that wasn’t shonen demographic or isekai genre was Apothecary Diaries.
Quote: "Thank god for Apothecary Diaries." lol
Crunchyroll has by far the biggest market share of overseas anime viewership, followed by Netflix to a lesser extent. No other providers come close.
The perception among production companies is that Netflix is where people are getting converted from non-anime viewers into anime viewers, and CR is where established anime viewers go.
Average anime watch time among anime viewers on Netflix is 1.5 hours per month, whereas on CR it’s 1.5 hours per day (?!)
Discovery on Netflix is heavily determined by what the Netflix promotes / actively surfaces to users, and that tends to skew towards particular series — likely reinforces that views are going to already-popular series and that new anime viewers are getting funnelled into certain genres.
Netflix doesn't license all that much anime compared to what they could be licensing, so that further skews things. Also, even if a series is licensed to Netflix, if the Netflix algorithm doesn't actively push it to users, no one on Netflix will watch it.
Rating sites such as MyAnimeList tend to be skewed towards a particular type of fan that is not representative of the actual market, and these ratings are meaningless when it comes to actual success metrics. IIRC he said only a few% of very frequent anime watchers actually rate/review things.
He phrased it as "rating things on MAL is not normal behavior" which made me lol
Anime adapted from light novels tends to perform the best compared to anime adapted from other sources (manga, webcomic, games) and original anime. Adaptations from manga is #2; everything else is wayy behind.
Solo Leveling seems like quite an outlier in this regard since anime adaptations from webcomics tend to be among the least popular
The single feature most correlated with success of an isekai was whether the main female character has big breasts and that’s not a joke.
Quote: "If the main female character has big breasts your anime will likely overperform, and if the main female character is a monster girl your anime will likely underperform. Because things aren’t fair."
At one point he was like yes I really do have to go into serious business meetings and present this anime breast data to client companies.
There’s a perception among audiences that pirating animanga that isn’t legally available in your country will prove there’s a demand for it, and lead to it getting licensed in your country, but this isn’t true. Pirating stats don’t actually have much effect on whether stuff gets licensed — because there’s no reliable conversion from people who pirate -> people who will pay to view legally.
Studios get booked for projects 3-4 years out, so stuff for 2029-2030 is getting booked now. There are a lot of reboots/sequels/franchises/reusing-IPs type projects getting booked, just like what western media studios have been doing, because (as with western media) companies want the reliability of IP that is known to be successful rather than the risk of something new.
He concluded that the quality of storytelling in animanga is completely unrelated to whether it is popular, and that, at the current time, the popularity of a series essentially just comes down to 1. is it a shonen, 2. sheer luck. rip
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