2017 is the year that Anime becomes mainstream.
02–27–2017 | Kun Gao
A look back at 2016…
Every metric that we track points to renewed engagement from core fans and waves of new audience discovering Anime for the first time. We are truly at the tipping point for this incredible medium. To be sure, this didn’t happen overnight. Much of the groundwork for what we expect in 2017 was put in place years in advance, from which we have experienced tremendous growth in 2016 that continues to accelerate well into the new year.
1M subscribers and growing — Crunchyroll continues to be a Top 10 SVOD service
While the field of SVOD continues to become more crowded, Crunchyroll has stayed in the Top 10 with the likes of WWE, HBO Now and Showtime. As we surpassed 1 million paid subscribers, growth has only accelerated. Domestically, growth has continued to be extremely robust, surpassing even our own expectations and challenging how we think about the true size of this passionate audience. Overseas continues to be blue sky as Europe and Latin America continues to be our fastest growth regions with 70% and 56% YOY respectively.
As we are the only revenue sharing platform among the top SVOD operators, the continued growth of our subscriber base translates directly into more royalties back to anime studios, producers, and licensors. It is hard to believe that in less than eight years, we’ve increased this pool by over ten thousand percent (100x).
8B minutes of anime watched by premium users in 2016
Our audience continues to consume an increasing amount of premium video content, spending an average of 1,000 minutes per month just watching anime, or put another way, more than 30 minutes a day. For context, Facebook users are spending ~22 minutes a day on Facebook. In addition to video consumption, we see continued growth in engagement on our manga, news, forums, ecommerce and other services. Premium video continues to stand out well against the myriad of options that vie for attention of the youth audience, such as gaming, social, and mobile
The largest home for anime content globally
In Q4 of 2016, we simulcasted nearly all titles broadcasting in Japan. As the international demand of anime and the reach on Crunchyroll has increased, our content partners have continued to work with us to grant more rights in more territories. We are now able to provide the most complete simulcast offering ever in Latin America, Europe, and Oceania, spanning multiple languages including Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, and Arabic, all within hours of original Japan TV broadcast.
Through our partnerships with local distributors in multiple countries, we’ve amassed significant catalog, eclipsing over 950 titles as we continue to add to the collection of classic anime titles accessible to our viewers. Crunchyroll is now truly the destination for anime fans.
The largest social footprint for anime globally
Crunchyroll’s engagement exploded through our “by fans for fans” approach with user insights from social and on-platform research. Over the last year, we cemented our social presence in the community by growing the largest social following in anime. As we continue to superserve our core audience, we are also embracing and welcoming new audience. As a flagbearer of anime globally, we feel it is our responsibility to cultivate, educate, and create new fans. We’ve begun creating engaging off-platform content — short-form series such as “Anime Academy” — with the specific goal to introduce and educate anime to a wide audience.
We are more than simply a global SVOD service
A look toward 2017:
We’re very excited about where Crunchyroll the business as well as the brand is headed in 2017, and much of this work will set the foundations for growth well beyond 2017.
Through our partnership with Sumitomo, we’ve already invested in more than two dozen anime productions and our efforts are starting to bear fruit. For example, one of our co-produced titles — Masamune Kun’s Revenge — has been a top title for Crunchyroll this season on service, as well as a hit globally.
We are continuing to push the envelope on what we believe to be true creative collaboration between East and West. Our originals collaborations, including Children of Ether with LeSean Thomas, and SHELTER with Porter Robinson, has both received acclaim and strong support from our audience. The anime medium is experiencing an international renaissance as foreign creators who grew up on anime look east to collaborations with Japan. Our role is continue to build that bridge through our audience, data and our unique position in the anime market.
We recently announced our inaugural in house event, Crunchyroll Expo, to be held in August 2017 on the 100,000 square feet facilities of the Santa Clara Convention Center. It will be a celebration of everything fandom, bringing together partners, exhibitors, influencers, creators and of course fans around the content they all love.
Finally, we have a unique opportunity to create an everlasting brand with a fast growing audience looking for something truly differentiated. We think going forward the Crunchyroll brand is ripe to be everywhere our fans are, and it won’t be constrained to just our service anymore.
