Answerman

$60 Billion Question

Haruki M. in Melbourne asks:

Dear Answerman, I keep reading that the anime industry is headed for a global value of $60 billion by 2030, that Crunchyroll just hit 21 million subscribers, and now they're launching some kind of B2B summit at New York Comic Con. As someone who's been watching anime for twenty years, part of me is thrilled, and part of me is worried. Thrilled because the shows I love are finally getting the recognition they deserve. Worried because every time something niche gets that big, the thing that made it good gets hollowed out. Answerman! I want a straight answer: can the industry actually get to $60 billion, and if it does, what does that mean for the people making it and the people watching it?

I always do my best to provide a straight answer, and just like you, I have some of the same reservations about this industry and culture that I love. Anime has been good to me, and I would be lying if I told you I'm not worried about our fandom changing, and worse, its impending enshittification, once the Masters of the Universe (I don't mean He-Man and friends) start paying real attention to the number of zeroes at the end of a valuation. Actually, how many zeroes are in sixty billion?

I think it's ten zeroes, but let's not get bogged down in that. The honest answer is that the $60 billion is credible, the industry's structural problems are real and urgent, and fans like us - the ones who've spent decades outside Japan wishing we could access what Japanese otaku take for granted - are closer to our best anime life than we have ever been. Allow me to explain.

In October 2024, the US-based investment bank Jefferies published a research note forecasting that the global anime market would double from approximately $31 billion in 2023 to $60.1 billion by 2030. That headline has been circulating ever since, and was most recently cited in articles in The Wall Street Journal and The Hollywood Reporter, both tied to Sony's annual earnings report from May 8th. In short, when it comes to Sony's global anime vertical, otherwise known as Crunchyroll, LLC, things are going gangbusters.

The Association of Japanese Animations, the most authoritative primary source for industry data. They have compiled 22 years of figures from Japanese studios, broadcasters, and licensing bodies, and they have confirmed the total anime market (That's the world including Japan) reached $25 billion in 2024, a 14.8% year-on-year record. Jefferies, working from a broader methodology that captures global retail, theme parks, and secondary market activity, puts the 2023 baseline higher at $31.2 billion. Both numbers are correct. They are just counting different things.

This matters when you do the math. Getting from Jefferies' $31.2 billion 2023 baseline to $60 billion by 2030 requires approximately 10% compound annual growth (Have you ever heard of “CAGR”? This is what it means) sustained over seven years. That is, by recent standards, a conservative ask. The AJA confirmed 14.8% growth in 2024. The year before that, 14.3%. On current form, the industry is actually running ahead of the pace that the Jeffries prediction requires. It is an astonishing growth rate that indicates that this $60 billion prediction is not a moonshot. If anything, it is a conservative read of a market that has been delivering above the maximum annual growth estimates for two years in a row.

Last week, Sony's fiscal year earnings confirmed that Crunchyroll has crossed 21 million paid subscribers. That's up from 17 million in May 2025. That's nearly 25% growth in under twelve months, at a time when virtually every other streaming service is reporting plateau or decline.

Crunchyroll president Rahul Purini told the Wall Street Journal that Japan produces approximately 300 anime series per year, and Crunchyroll acquires rights to roughly 80% of them across approximately 200 markets globally. In India, the service is priced at 98 rupees, around $1 USD per month. In Brazil, 9.99 real, approximately $3.72. These are not throwaway markets. India and Brazil are now identified as Crunchyroll's primary growth engines for 2025-2026, and the data bears this out: 60% of Gen Z and Gen Alpha consumers in Brazil reportedly watch anime multiple times a week.

This is not a story about a corporation squeezing emerging markets for cheap subscribers. This is a story about the legitimization of anime fandom in parts of the world where, until very recently, a dedicated, premium, anime-first streaming service simply did not exist. Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Brazil, Mexico; these are countries with enormous, passionate, deeply engaged anime audiences who have historically had two options: pay for a service unavailable in their territory, or pirate.

The piracy lobby has always argued that its existence is justified by the absence of legal alternatives. Crunchyroll's investment in Latin America and South and Southeast Asia is the most effective counter-argument to that position the industry has ever deployed. When you put a legal, affordable, premium-quality service in front of a fan who previously had no legitimate choice, they take it. They become a subscriber. They become a paying member of the anime economy. And crucially, over time, as disposable income rises and fandom deepens, they become the kind of fan who buys merchandise, attends events, and goes to the cinema for the theatrical release. Perhaps we, OG fans, need to start regarding the $1/month for what it really is. Not the end destination in Crunchyroll's relationship with Indian fans, but more of a handshake. “Welcome to the club. Are you ready to go on a journey?” The $60 billion thesis requires those subscribers to gradually migrate up the pricing curve as markets mature. That is a reasonable assumption over five to six years. It is the central financial bet of Crunchyroll's emerging market strategy, and it is a bet worth making.

The same week the subscriber numbers landed, Crunchyroll announced the inaugural Crunchyroll Anime Future Forum: an invite-only B2B industry summit to be held October 7 at the Javits Center in New York, timed to coincide with New York Comic Con. The Hollywood Reporter broke the story. The forum's theme is "Designing for Anime's Future," with sessions structured around fandom, technology, storytelling, and IP protection. Purini's framing was pointed: "This is the first and only type of industry event outside of Japan where anime is front and center for discussion." Whether you find that inspiring or slightly alarming probably depends on where you sit in the food chain.

The industry cannot reach $60 billion through streaming alone. Merchandising represents 31-44% of total domestic industry revenue and remains dramatically under-monetized internationally. Theatrical generates the headlines: Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle grossed approximately $741 million worldwide after its September 2025 release, becoming the highest-grossing Japanese film of all time, with Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc following with $94 million internationally in its opening weeks. For the theatrical business to contribute meaningfully to a $60 billion total, the industry needs three to four franchise-level events per year - consistently. Live events, experiences, merchandise, and gaming are all contributors that the broadest market projections are only beginning to count seriously.

But none of this matters if the production ecosystem that generates the content collapses under its own contradictions. And that is a genuine risk.

The industry is generating record revenue. The people who actually make it are not sharing in that revenue meaningfully. A Japan Research Institute report found that Japanese production studios earn only 6% of overseas sales revenue. The remaining 94% flows to production committee members - publishers, broadcasters, toy companies, music labels - who hold IP rights in exchange for co-financing productions, but who currently have minimal structural incentive to invest in improving production conditions or animator pay. The consequence: 60% of anime production companies saw profitability decline in 2024 despite the record market. Eight studios ceased operations in the first nine months of 2025.

Here is where the broader Japanese economic context becomes inescapable. Japan has been experiencing its most sustained inflationary period in three decades - CPI ran at 3.27% in 2023 and 2.7% in 2024, with food prices rising far faster. Tokyo studio rents hit a record ¥101,000 per month average in June 2025, up 8.9% year-on-year. Entry-level animators in Japan - those on permanent contracts - earn a floor salary of approximately ¥200,000 per month gross. After mandatory deductions for income tax, health insurance, and pension, that becomes roughly ¥150,000–¥160,000 take-home. In a city where rent alone is likely to consume 44–47% of their net income, these workers are getting poorer in real terms, year on year. The freelance in-between animators, still nearly half the workforce, have it worse still. Paid by the drawing at piece rates (“per cut”) that have barely moved while everything around them has become more expensive.

Twenty-five percent of animators leave the industry within four years. Sixty-eight percent are gone within eight. Japan cannot build a $60 billion industry on a workforce that is burning out and voting with its feet.

There are signs for cautious optimism, however. Japan's government now understands that this is an industrial emergency, and not just a labour dispute. Anime and gaming exports have surpassed the value of Japan's semiconductor sector. The Keidanren, Japan's most powerful business federation, representing Toyota and Mitsubishi, issued an urgent appeal in October 2025 for immediate government support of the creative industries. METI's New Cool Japan Strategy includes explicit policy language about performance-based pay reform and animator compensation. The Nippon Anime and Film Culture Association (NAFCA) is conducting ongoing workforce surveys and lobbying for legislative protections for freelance creators. Japan's Freelance Act, enacted in 2024, extended some protections, though significant gaps remain regarding fair compensation.

The question is whether policy intent translates to studio economics quickly enough. When an industry becomes a genuine pillar of national export strategy, as anime now indisputably has, the case for legislative intervention to protect its production workforce becomes not merely ethical, but strategically rational. Private stakeholders who fail to bring their own house in order should expect the government to do it for them. That is not a threat; it is just how industrial policy works when the stakes are this high.

Is The Great Enshittification coming for anime? It's a fair concern. Scale brings resources, reach, and theatrical ambition, but it also brings formulaic IP extension, franchise-first commissioning, and upstream control by platform giants with global mandates.

I have been sitting with my own feelings on this topic. It feels so personal to me. I was part of anime's second big wave of expansion into the West, and I inadvertently surrendered my place in it to the corporate behemoth. Those of us who have loved anime from outside Japan, whether in Melbourne, London, São Paulo, or Chennai, have spent our entire fandom lives looking at the Japanese otaku experience and knowing we could never really access it. The depth of the merchandise, the super-cool exhibitions and events, and the theatrical releases on the opening weekend. The pop-up shops and limited edition collabs, and those gorgeous sukajan jackets. The general, glorious, overwhelming, beautiful availability of anime in every corner of daily life. That has always been a specifically Japanese privilege.

The $60 billion thesis is, at its core, the thesis that the rest of the world gets to start living that life. The global merchandise market is barely scratching the surface of what it could be. International theatrical is in its infancy. Anime conventions now exist in 51 countries. Crunchyroll is running its Ani-May promotion across 35 countries. Nike is doing Yu-Gi-Oh! Air Max collaborations. The world is slowly, commercially, becoming more like Japan for those of us who want to live our best otaku lives. We are also becoming “more Japanese” in other ways too, but I will save that for another column.

That doesn't mean nothing will get worse. Some of it will. But the direction of travel - more availability, more reach, more economic incentive to serve global fans properly is, for us, unambiguously positive.

The Anime Future Forum's theme, "Designing for Anime's Future," is exactly the right question. The test of whether it is a genuine inflection point or an elaborate networking event for people who are already doing fine is a question I would prefer to ask Japanese animators and the audience that they serve. Most of whom, will not be in the room on October 7th at the Javitz Center.

I'll be watching. And so should you.

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