Lucas
Chris, last Friday intrepid reporter and one of the best goddamn anime data journalists in the game, Kalai Chik, published a deep dive into the most popular anime titles of last year, and what they reveal about the global anime industry and the anime stream landscape. While everyone who cares about this artistic medium and the industry around it should read this piece, the big takeaway is that Crunchyroll reigns supreme for now, despite some big names getting into the Anime biz in the past couple of years.
Kalai attributes much of Crunchyroll's success in retaining its crown to the resources it's put into marketing/advertising/promoting it's catalog, and as two boys who get the word out for our day jobs, I'd love to dig into this article and this segment of the anime industry with you!
Chris
Lucas, I'm glad you brought this up! As someone who effectively lives in the anime fandom, I'm always fascinated by what shows get seen, and how they get seen, by people who don't know the exact day the new season starts. People who are blissfully unaware that there are a dozen isekai and litRPG shows dumped out onto the stream at the same time as the hot new premiere of Frieren.
I bring this up because at that aforementioned advertising day job, my extremely mainstream co-workers in fact brought up Frieren as a show they had been watching and enjoying. Combine that with some chatter I saw online from some who felt the series occupied "normie" cultural viewer status, plus that article from Kalai on the reach of these things, and we've got a stew goin'.
Frieren is actually a GREAT title to start this conversation off with because, for as big as the first season was and for as many people outside of the anime bubble who are watching the second season, the anime has actually had a more muted impact than what many (myself included) were expecting!
Don't get me wrong, it's still probably the second or third most popular anime of the season, but for how much the first season popped off with audiences not normally into anime, I thought this would be the release to beat this season!
While a lot of factors could be at play here, like Frieren season two releasing later in January than most other titles and this season having a shorter episode count, in my opinion, it seems like the biggest factor in this season being more of a sleeper hit is Crunchyroll putting its promotional resources in other baskets.
One has to wonder if Frieren's arrival on Netflix, which might have burgeoned its reach to regular audiences, might inform Crunchy's more muted promotion. This is the network that allegedly didn't promote a megahit like Dan Da Dan on account of it not being an exclusive title for them.
Frieren is still popping up on Smart TV ads put out by Crunchyroll, and as you said, I'm still seeing a fair amount of enthused discussion about it from my own anime-flavored corner of social media. But that's tempered by some of the discussion (colloquial as this is) remarking on it being in the same "coworker anime" basket as stuff like Solo Leveling or Frieren's seasonal contemporary Jujutsu Kaisen. The stuff that trends on the front page of Crunchyroll, first to be clicked on by audiences that aren't diving deeper in the catalog.
I think you're right on the money with the impact of that Netflix bump! While Kalai's article makes a very strong case for a Netflix release doesn't guarantee a title will be a hit; in my own experience as an anime PR person, having a title on the biggest streaming platform around will REALLY help secure non-endemic coverage.
Beyond Netflix's larger subscriber count immediately making an anime title more visible to a potential audience, a lot of general entertainment press covers Netflix premieres and acquisition announcements as a matter of industry reporting. That same affordance isn't extended to much smaller and less Hollywood-connected Crunchyroll, meaning a Netflix release has a lot of baked-in advantages from a PR perspective.
And to your point about mega hits, the biggest thing working against Frieren is that Jujutsu Kaisen is releasing at the same time this season. Even a company with Sony's backing doesn't have infinite resources, and with JJK being a cash cow with no signs of slowing down, it makes sense that the current King of Shonen would be prioritized in CR's promotional efforts.
Jujutsu Kaisen, incidentally, is another one also available on Netflix.
Hey there, Maki. If Netflix knew what they were doing, they'd be advertising the show with your new look.
Now, as you indicated and also came up in Kalai's article, Netflix's reach with general audiences and mainstream entertainment press means the anime it's putting out there are going to be seen by more people—particularly those that watch plenty of other stuff besides anime. I joshed Crunchyroll's front-paging habits, but there's still more discoverability for niche titles compared to Netflix pimping their originals and big-name licenses next to, uh, Star Search.
Nice to see SHIBOYUGI getting the shout-out, though.
These titles are getting seen as a matter of course due to the number of people who fire up their streaming apps. I think that may contribute to the titles being seen as "mainstream". And it contrasts with Crunchyroll, who have to actively promote its series on other outlets like social media, to get viewers who might not go there normally onto a dedicated anime streaming service.
It's not a perfect comparison, but from my vantage point as an industry pundit, Netflix is basically "new cable." People having access to Netflix is a safe assumption in 2026; new releases on that platform are regularly covered by entertainment trade outlets, and releases there have a bigger likelihood of being a longtail success, as it's rare for new audiences to subscribe to a platform like Crunchyroll to watch older series. That doesn't guarantee that a title releasing on Netflix will escape anime containment and become a "watercooler hit," but it seems like it ups the odds if a title is likely to be popular anyway!
Oh! And speaking of social media, I cannot begin to stress how much anime publicity is grounded in social, and more broadly digital, media efforts. I've been working in anime PR full-time for two years this coming May, and I've contributed to maybe two or three physical or irl promotional efforts outside of convention panels/activations in that time. I know this tracks for people deep in the anime space, but folks who work in different PR disciplines are usually surprised when I express this split!
You know what helps social media publicity for anime? Being able to take and post screencaps couchcrunchyrollcough.
I can also confirm that "out of home" advertising is a very different, decidedly rarer beast, especially for media like anime. Not that it doesn't happen (the likes of Chainsaw Man got ads in Times Square), but overall these companies are going after would-be viewers in mediums adjacent to where they'd be watching these shows. Hence, the aforementioned Smart TV ads.
There's motivation to get that word out, too! You mentioned series becoming "watercooler hits," and there is precedent for that, selling subs to a service. It's not an anime, but for instance, I've got to think of last year when Severance became the only Apple TV show I think I'd ever heard anyone talk about. Series can be "system sellers," such as Attack on Titan and My Hero Academia for Funimation back in the day.
God, I want to be able to put a series that I'm promoting on a billboard SO BAD! If for no other reason than to be able to take a picture of it and have a useful (and cool) shorthand to explain to friends and family exactly what I do for a living.
Haha, right now my go-to explainer for my 9-5 is "You know Mad Men? I do that, but for nerd stuff!"
And, even if any criticism you can levy against Apple is likely valid, it was impressive to see how effectively the company organized all of Apple TV's releases and promotional activities around the surge that Severance season two generated last year. No disrespect to Seth Rogen, but like half the people who watched The Studio likely only did so because it immediately followed Severance season two's conclusion and folks still had a few weeks' left on their Apple TV subscription.
And that also speaks to the friction generated by Crunchyroll putting all of their promotional resources into one or two baskets each season. They're not necessarily wrong to do that from a quarterly business perspective, but it does mean that a lot of critically acclaimed releases are left under-promoted on their platform each season, and smaller to mid-sized productions feel like they get routinely bumped for whatever mega title Crunchyroll thinks is likely to be more popular or that they have a more direct financial stake in.
You're telling me. I'm still sore about the way Crunchy unceremoniously shuffled Gridman Universe onto the service with no theatrical run, no dub, and a year-and-a-half late with hardly any promotion. You'd think the new movie from the studio behind the previous breakout hit here Promare might've merited a bit more attention, but hey, what do I know.
Now, by its nature as an anime-specific platform, you can argue that Crunchyroll provides an on-ramp to those more niche series simply by virtue of audiences being there to watch Solo Leveling or whatever. Odds are that some viewers are going to see something that catches their eye that they wouldn't find otherwise. Or at least that's the only plausible explanation for the time my bartender told me he was hooked on Chillin' in My 30s after Getting Fired from the Demon King's Army.
Oh god, that's incredible, and I am SO curious to find out how your bartender ended up that deep in the anime mines! That being said, you've laid out the exact reason why so many anime titles do and should release on an anime-focused streaming service like Crunchyroll. From a PR perspective, the absolute ceiling for a rinse-and-repeat isekai title like Chilin' In My 30s is disseminating in endemic anime spaces, and Crunchyroll's is the best platform for that post Funimation merge, and with HIDIVE still being so niche.
While I don't have a ton of public facing data to support this, the conventional wisdom right now is that going with Crunchyroll as a sole distributor won't necessarily raise the ceiling for the average release, but there's a good chance it'll raise the floor and Kalia's article expresses as much via the perspective of Vincent Imaoka, Netflix's former Producer of Original Anime.
Titles that aren't a Frieren or a Jujutsu Kaisen are absolutely going to get more eyeballs on them if they're on Crunchyroll. Netflix mostly seems to sustain the known heavy hitters—though we still see new things break through like Cosmic Princess Kaguya as well as whiffing known quantities like JoJo's Bizarre Adventure (prayer circle for Steel Ball Run). And even that's better than going to Amazon to die. RIP the new Ghost in the Shell anime.
2026 Shirow Masamune/KODANSHA/THE GHOST IN THE SHELL COMMITTEE
Of course, the flipside of Crunchyroll being a more effective home for non-juggernaut anime is that there's getting to be less and less chance of them giving any of those a home video release. That's less pertinent when it comes to marketing these shows to general mainstream audiences. But then it speaks to the level of notoriety one of their shows has that anybody can walk into a Walmart and pick up a disc set of Solo Leveling.
Photo by Christopher Farris
Yeah, people who have been doing this kind of trendspotting for longer than I have will tell you that there are no surefire rules to any of this. Amazon, a hyper-capitalistic company, trying to make Prime the new home for "prestige" anime titles like the new Ghost in the Shell or SANDA instead of sniping mega-hits that have audiences that will follow them makes about as much sense as the critically underwhelming Solo Leveling somehow becoming one of the faces of anime in the US.
Real "Obama awarding himself" meme energy from Crunchyroll on that one. Unsurprisingly, Solo Leveling beating out Frieren in those awards has been another component of discourse I've seen around the latter show's current season.
Yeaaaaaaah~ I don't wanna go full "tinfoil hat" with my speculation, but I've gotta believe Crunchyroll doing a borderline astroturfing campaign for Solo Leveling (which is made by the Sony-owned A-1 Pictures and produced by the also Sony-owned Aniplex) while Frieren (which was animated by Madhouse which Sony only owns 5% of) was treated like a windfall by Crunchyroll has something to do with those noted financial dimensions.
Oh, weird! How did that classic board game logo get mixed into my images for this column? Oh well~
As I can confirm, though, it worked! General audiences watch and talk about Solo Leveling. It's so-called "hype moments and aura farming" with its noticeably glitzy animation play well clipped on social media. Kalai's article even checks Netflix not getting Solo Leveling as a reason for them pivoting their anime angle to the live-action adaptation arena.
Oh god, I forgot BET existed until this very moment! Did Netflix only make that show because they wanted their own take on Euphoria? It feels like Netflix only made that show because they wanted their own take on Euphoria!
If there's one thing I can say for certain about entertainment trends, it's that everybody's chasing whatever the last big hit was until the next big hit comes out of left field. Are streamers going to start investing in animation and anime-adjacent media again now that Kpop Demon Hunters was an outright cultural moment in 2025? Is the entire animation industry about to come up with Zootopia 2 being the highest-grossing animated movie of all time? It's impossible to say for sure, and I'd be wary of anyone preaching definitive answers, but I can't help but feel like all of this information is one big puzzle that's a lot of fun to piece together!
Instead of grousing about whether Frieren viewers are too "normie" or not, it's more interesting to think about what a series like Frieren succeeding in the mainstream means! Yes, I know Frieren is a major mainstream shonen property in Japan. But as exemplified with series like Jujutsu Kaisen, Demon Slayer, and Solo Leveling, it's usually flashy high-energy shows from that space that break through here, as opposed to the quieter, more contemplative Frieren (which, to be fair, does have its own hype moments).
If nothing else, Frieren's success denotes that anime audiences contain just as many multitudes as the anime medium! While I wish works that were more personally affecting to me hit escape velocity more often, I'll gladly leverage Frieren's success to get more folks deeper into this artform and community.
Right! Having your co-workers talk about Frieren just makes it easier to recommend that they check out Delicious in Dungeon. Some of the deeper selections are...less recommendable, but I'm sure there's at least one person I can take my chances on who would appreciate the genuine artistry of How NOT to Summon a Demon Lord. An open-minded bartender, perhaps?
If this conversation proves anything, it's that you gotta up your favorite shows yourself a lot of the time, since these companies aren't going out of their way to advertise or promote anything that's not in that 1% of mainstream mega-popularity.
And, as professional anime-opinion-havers, we're happy to pick up the slack and get the word out on the titles that are the actual high water marks of the medium! Remember, folks, popularity doesn't always equate to achievement or influence, and the stuff that will hit you the hardest is usually the stuff that takes some digging to find. Though taking the time to try something new and outside of the mainstream will always be rewarding in one way or another.
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