Yes, People Are Gambling on the Crunchyroll Anime Awards

Is it even possible to accurately predict the winners based on publicly available data?

Online sports betting has gotten to the Crunchyroll Anime Awards. Is this a good or bad thing? Does it matter? And how would you actually predict a winner? Here’s what I know, based on my experience as the former Crunchyroll employee who ran the awards from their inception to 2021.

But first… - Miles A.

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Chart of the Week

Results are in for the start of the 2025 spring simulcast season! Let’s break it down:

• After going on hiatus in October 2024, the One Piece anime is back on top, adapting the highly anticipated Egghead Arc. While viewership and popularity for the title are high, its legal viewership to piracy ratio decreased. Since Crunchyroll removed One Piece from its free plan, viewers who subscribed for One Piece and unsubscribed during the hiatus seem to be taking after Luffy, rather than resubscribing to the platform.

• Despite fan controversy about perceived animation quality, The Beginning After the End anime adaptation is the highest performing debut title of the spring season so far. This is chiefly thanks to its large, dedicated, built-in audience from its popular source material - a web novel and comic adaptation on Tapas. While high expectations that led initial social media buzz have not been met, it’s still being watched in droves.

• The Apothecary Diaries continues to perform well, and has increased in viewership from the end of the previous cour. Season 1 being licensed to Netflix and Hulu also helped the title reach new fans, and spurred increased social discussion throughout both cours of season 2.

• Second only to One Piece’s return, To Be Hero X was the most discussed title of the season during April.

• Lazarus received a lot of press coverage prior to the spring season, but Warner Media gave the title very little other kinds of promotion. Despite this, Lazarus made it into HBO Max’s top 10 a few times in April. - Chloe C.

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Entertainment At Large

How Will President Trump's Proposed Foreign Film Tariff Affect Anime? (Anime News Network)

After Trump made a nonsensical post about somehow putting tariffs on foreign films, U.S. anime fans and news outlets started panicking. So why aren’t anime industry analysts (like us!) worried? Jerome Mazandarani’s recent Answerman column has a really great breakdown of why.

The TLDR is that if anything like a “foreign film tariff” happens, it won’t happen anytime soon, and it won’t look like what people are fearing. (Not to say it won’t be bad, but the economics of how film, TV, and anime distribution work make this a bit more complicated than it seems). For now, there are plenty of other awful things to worry about.- Klaudia A.

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This Shonen Anime Fights Toxic Masculinity (Aftermath)

This is a lovely piece by critic Isaiah Colbert about why Wind Breaker is such a necessary piece of media for teen boys. It breaks down how this action shonen anime adaptation is being received by western audiences, and interacting with the culture wars, in a great way.

(With the Valnet purchase and slow death of Polygon as a news outlet, you should definitely follow and support Aftermath’s games and media journalism as well!) - Klaudia A.

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Ones to Watch

READ: Run Away With Me, Girl

I regularly find my reading list testing my patience with an overwhelming amount of ongoing titles, where I must await chapter updates weekly, or sometimes even monthly. If you find your patience for updates wearing thin, this 3 volume, completed manga is a perfect fit for when you want a full story that you can devour in a day. This josei manga’s expressive art has a light, care-free quality, that juxtaposes its weightier and more down-to-earth take on the yuri trope of “girls who dated in high school break up once they graduate and start dating men.”

The characters are messy, but are given the development to allow readers to understand, without excusing, their choices and actions. Run Away With Me, Girl is a refreshing, adult yuri that rewards its readers, and with all the volumes out and licensed in English, there’s no reason not to start reading it immediately. - Chloe C.

WATCH: Anne Shirley

Once again, an anime targeted at women is flying under the radar this anime season — Anne Shirley is not getting the hype it deserves. (Crunchyroll didn’t even post a full trailer, just a teaser!) Whether you read the book as a kid, are still mad Anne With An E got cancelled by Netflix, or have never heard of Anne of Green Gables, you HAVE to be watching Anne Shirley.

ICYMI, Japanese people LOVE Anne of Green Gables. It is one of the first translated English novels to become popular in Japan, and its influence is felt throughout a lot of shojo media. It has been adapted into anime several times, the first being an anime classic by future Studio Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata. One could argue we would not have the inquisitive, nuanced young girls who lead many Ghibli classics without Anne.

So it has been delightful to see this new anime adaptation bring that tradition to modern audiences. Much like the recent Ranma ½ remake, it combines older animation styles and character designs with modern, polished animation technique, creating a balanced and beautiful show that puts a smile on my face every week. It’s visually beautiful to look at, does a great job of adapting the novel, and has an English dub with clearly Canadian accents that is a love letter to its setting on Prince Edward Island. - Klaudia A.

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Yes, People Are Gambling on the Crunchyroll Anime Awards

“They are selling dollars for 85c,” my friend Rajan recently messaged a group, linking to the popular betting site Polymarket. The bet in question? Who was going to win Anime of the Year at this year’s Crunchyroll Anime Awards. Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End topped the list with an 86% chance of winning at the time. Betting on the Anime Awards? Welcome to the future!

This is something of an “anime is a big deal” moment. These moments are getting less special these days because they happen so often, but I believe there’s still value in identifying them and documenting them as they happen. These days, thanks to rapid if inconsistent deregulation, sports betting is about as mainstream as it gets in the U.S. According to recent research from Siena College, a full half of men between 18-49 have an account on at least one online sports betting site. This is one part of “the culture” which anime had not previously penetrated, at least not in any significant amount. So are these bets on the Anime Awards some sort of progress? They’re representative of mainstream adoption, if nothing else.

So let’s set some context. Although various Anime Awards categories have been “trending” on betting sites since the nominations were announced, the amount of money changing hands here is still fairly minimal. On Polymarket, the NBA Champion currently has the equivalent of $2 billion USD in total trade volume, and the outcome of the New York City mayoral race has $12 million in active trades. By contrast, the six gamble-able categories of the Anime Awards amount to a total of $2.5M USD. That’s significantly more action than the Tony Awards are getting, but somewhere in the middle of guessing the number of tweets Elon Musk will make this week, and guessing the number of jobs he’ll cut as part of DOGE by July.

I hope the absurdity of these gambling sites, particularly Polymarket, is somewhat obvious from these comparisons. Personally, I don’t find it any more or less absurd than gambling on the minutia of what happens in a given professional sporting event, where the decks are even more stacked against players. I’m not here to equivocate about the morals of gambling, but I do find the overly-slick and hyper-gamified execution of it on the major gambling sites to be pernicious at the very least. That said, in the U.S., sports gambling online is totally legal, but Polymarket is not. But throughout human history, legal status for gambling has been less a deterrent and more of an inconvenience. Polymarket’s user base suggests as much, with 22% of its visitors coming from the US before accounting for VPN traffic, per SimilarWeb.

The odds here are pretty interesting to me, as someone who theoretically, were I interested in doing so, would have some of the biggest databases and research available to game out the winner. Not only do I run a market research and strategy company focused on anime and manga, but I’m the guy who originally built the Anime Awards voting system and ran it for its first five years. However, even if I put aside ethics and my personal apathy towards gambling, I would not imagine these advantages would necessarily convert into a positive EV (expected value) situation. That’s because, starting in 2023, Crunchyroll stopped providing a breakdown on how the winners were determined, and that’s essential for correctly predicting the winners.