What Percentage of the Population Watches Anime?
Everywhere you go there’s an anime reference! A sentence, phrase, pose, song, cosplay, and what not?!
So, is anime truly that popular, or are YOU simply trapped in a group of people who share a common interest in this popular culture?
Anime, in particular, gained popularity in January 2021 and has maintained a steady level of popularity since then. According to Google Trends, anime popularity peaked in April, June, and August 2021.
There are three ways to enjoy anime.
Japanese television
A television subscription in Japan enables you to watch anime as it is broadcast on channels such as NHK, TV Asahi, and TV Tokyo. Typically, these anime are aimed at children, adolescents, and adults.
These are typically aired at different times to accommodate the target audience’s convenience, with children’s anime typically airing before school and adult anime airing later in the night, when the children are asleep.
According to a 2019 survey conducted by Nippon Research Centre, approximately 33% of the Japanese population consumes anime and manga on a regular basis.
Japan’s population was 123.112 million Japanese nationals in 2020.
This results in a population of 40.59 million Japanese people who watch anime on their televisions on a regular basis. Bear in mind that these are people who consume anime on a regular basis. Anime is a very usual part of the culture in Japan like watching the news and almost everyone watches anime.
Just watching anime doesn’t make you a weeb or subscribe you to the ‘otaku’ subculture.
These are people who buy merchandise like body pillows, cosplay and attend conventions that are regularly held.
Streaming Services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime.
Streaming services provide easy access to any anime without the need to wait for a specific time or a specific day when the anime is aired. Streaming services specifically for anime watching are popular like Crunchyroll, Viz Media, Funimation, and so on.
All of the streaming services that exclusively stream anime combined together gives us 339.13M people.
Additionally, streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime, which offer other categories as well, easily have a 70% anime consumption rate, resulting in 99.82 million subscribers on Amazon Prime and another 100 million on Netflix.
Adding in all other local services adds another 100M.This means that the total number of people who watch anime on streaming services is approximately 638.95M.
Websites That Provide Original & Free Anime Like 9anime, gogoanime, kissanime, etc.
These websites and websites that provide pirated anime also provide a massive viewership for those who can’t afford a subscription and/or do not approve of exclusive licensing.
These websites collectively attract an audience of approximately 236.33 million people who use them to watch anime. This means that in total about 915.87M people watch anime on a regular basis!
The highest searched anime is Naruto, One Piece, Attack on Titan, Death Note, Haikyuu, My Hero Academia, Hunter X Hunter, Dragon Ball, and popular films by the widely known Studio Ghibli like Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle.
