Anime has stopped being a fringe interest on Asian streaming services. Media Partners Asia’s “The Anime Economy” report finds that the genre drew the largest monthly audience of any category across eight Asian markets between July 2025 and August 2026.
Monthly reach among premium VOD users ranged from 31% to 47% for anime, compared with 26% to 34% for the average of the other seven genres tracked. In Japan, the range was 45% to 59%. Anime accounted for 15.6% of tracked premium VOD hours in the second half of 2025 and 14.0% in the first half of 2026, with the Japan figure at 28%.
A single franchise resets the studio leaderboard
“Jujutsu Kaisen” ranked as the top anime title in seven of eight markets in the first half of 2026. That one franchise lifted MAPPA’s share of regional anime hours from 6.1% in the second half of 2025 to 17.3% in the first half of 2026, edging past TMS Entertainment at 16.6%. Toei Animation held 13% and titles mastered by Aniplex accounted for 12%.
For content buyers, the message is that a small number of must-have titles currently drive disproportionate share. A single hit can reshuffle the studio leaderboard in six months.
Netflix is the biggest pipe, but ownership is shifting
Netflix carried about half of the region’s anime viewing: 51% of anime hours in the second half of 2025 and 50% in the first half of 2026. In Japan, Prime Video held 43% in the second half of 2025 before Netflix pulled even at 42% each in the first half of 2026.
MPA’s classification of Netflix’s “What We Watched” disclosures shows Japanese anime viewing climbing from 3.33 billion hours in the first half of 2023 to 4.64 billion hours in the first half of 2026—a 39% increase against 4.5% growth for Netflix overall. Anime rose from 3.6% to 4.75% of all Netflix hours. Four-fifths of that viewing remains licensed library content, but the January 2026 MAPPA partnership points toward owned franchises.
YouTube and deals add a second pipeline
YouTube is now both a marketing channel and a production base. MPA counted 70 million people watching anime-related content monthly in Japan alone, totaling 2.8 billion hours. Official channels such as Aniplex, with 5.1 million monthly viewers, and Toho animation, with 4.8 million, operate as media businesses in their own right. YouTube-native studios like Plott are turning out franchises at a fraction of traditional TV production cost.
The structural picture is changing:
- 21 anime transactions and alliances since 2021, including 11 in 2025 and 2026.
- Sony participated in seven of those deals, pairing Crunchyroll’s 21 million paying subscribers with Sony Pictures, Sony Music and Aniplex, plus equity stakes in Kadokawa and Bandai Namco.
- MPA projects worldwide anime spending will grow about 10% annually through 2030, driven mainly by Asia outside Japan and North America.
- For the next 24 months, the base case is hybrid financing: platforms fund production while studios keep the rights.
MPA CEO Vivek Couto calls the current constraint “capacity, not demand or capital.” The report warns that studios behind the biggest hits often have the least ability to invest, and the industry still leans on a handful of franchises. Solving production capacity while retaining animation talent will separate the winners in the next phase of growth.
For streaming teams in Asia outside Japan—the report’s main growth region—anime is no longer a licensed add-on. It is a core hours driver, and the contest is shifting from distribution share to franchise ownership.
Source: Variety
