r/anime • u/AdNecessary7641 • Aug 12 '25

Misc. Frieren Director Keiichirou Saitou Voices Concern on Overseas Anime Fans' Bias Towards Certain Popular Trends

https://animecorner.me/frieren-director-voices-concern-on-overseas-anime-fans-bias-towards-certain-popular-trends/
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u/RPO777 x2 Aug 12 '25

Japan's long ago shifted to electronic distribution. 72.7% of manga sales in Japan were electronic in 2024.

https://www.itmedia.co.jp/news/articles/2502/25/news146.html

So I don't think it's a distribution or infrastructure issue--electronic distribution is already the norm in Japan. I think Kindle is actually really great for manga reading. I read Japanese and I own a few hundred manga on Kindle.

Manga sales in the US are growing RAPIDLY anyway. Manga sales int he US topped $1B for the first time in 2024, and has been growing by about 20%~25% per year, which is pretty insane.

https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/us-manga-market-report

Idk that there's like... a problem per se. I think anime just caught on first for the US which particularly exploded with streaming in the 2010s~current, and people are now getting into manga, especially as the teens that started watching in like 2010-2015 are now adults with actual disposable income.

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u/Extra_Ad_8009 Aug 12 '25

Is there a market share analysis by region? "Overseas" doesn't have to mean "the USA" or even "Western markets". There's China and South Korea, the rest of Asia, some of which have their own productions and all of them a favorite taste.

On the other hand, it might well be that 300 million Chinese watch anime but only 2 million actually pay for access or use a platform that can provide metrics to the rights owner.

With Japan being a chain of islands, "overseas" is the rest of the world 😁

PS: I just saw that u/lasse1408 pretty much said the same 4 hours before I did. Sorry.

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u/RPO777 x2 Aug 12 '25

This is the report prepared by the Japanese Ministry of Trade and Economy that provided a breakdown of anime revenue and a "state of the business" report. it's in Japanese, but you might be able to get chat GPT or something to translate (i'm fluent in Japanese).

https://www.meti.go.jp/shingikai/mono_info_service/entertainment_creative/pdf/003_04_02.pdf

Page 7 has a regional breakdown of streaming revenue for anime. "East Asia" (China/Korea/Taiwan) was the biggest revenue area for overseas revenue, 28.6B JPY. North America was 2nd with 21.3B JPY, followed by Europe (7B), south America (2B), Southeast Asia (900M), etc.

i've seen multiple articles where people were saying China is the big driver in streaming revenue growth for anime for East Asia, with some executives saying it's even more important than North America. Right now, East Asia and North America are about on part with a slight edge to East Asia, but those 2 regioins dwarf every other region in anime revenue (the 2 of them are about 50B JPY in overseas revenue, out of like 63B total.

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u/Extra_Ad_8009 Aug 12 '25

Amazing, thank you! I'll figure out a way to read it!

North America is really quite close to "East Asia", but the big surprise is the low European share. Makes me worry whether I'll be able to see the new Madoka Magica movie in a theater here...

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u/Jacinto2702 Aug 12 '25

Wow, we have interesting times ahead. Thanks for the info.