What Netflix Isn’t Telling You About Its Anime Viewership

Netflix's latest numbers aren't what they seem.

We’re back from Anime Expo with analysis of one of the biggest headlines of the event, plus what’s next on this year’s con circuit. - Klaudia A.

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Chart of the Week

North America’s biggest anime industry event of the year, Anime Expo, is finally behind us, and the industry is already looking towards the next one. Anime NYC is the next anime-specific con with strong industry presence. In terms of attendance, it hasn’t reached the heights of Anime Expo, but it has grown steadily since its inaugural convention in 2017, essentially quadrupling estimated attendance in the seven years it has existed. Sponsored by Crunchyroll right out the gate, Anime NYC has become the premiere east coast anime convention, with the industry’s biggest names filling out its sponsor list. Still, even in this regard, Anime Expo reigns supreme.

While 2023 and 2024 estimates for unique attendance at Anime Expo are less accurate than previous years, we do know that it is still ahead of Anime NYC. Despite the attendance trendlines suggesting that the gap is closing, the picture has become more complicated as the anime presence for the non-anime-specific east coast convention, New York Comic Con, has risen in the past few years.

Crunchyroll and Webtoon had strong presences at NYCC in 2024, and are expected to return to it for 2025. Anime NYC and NYCC were once very different conventions, but they have grown to be competitors now that they both feature anime, and occur within 2 months of each other in the same exact convention center I’ll be keeping a close eye on the NYC cons these coming months to see whether the spread of anime to NYCC has turned Anime NYC, the east coast Anime Expo rival, into the next Crunchyroll Expo.

Regardless of which conventions draw the biggest crowds each year, the real winner is the anime industry overall, with fandom alive and well from coast to coast. - Chloe C.

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Entertainment At Large

A Chat With Crunchyroll’s President on Library Expansion, Growth In Games, Music and Manga (The Hollywood Reporter)

It’s interesting to see Mr. Purini continue saying the line about Crunchyroll having “the single largest library of anime content anywhere,” when the median anime fan would scoff at the notion thanks to piracy’s ubiquity in the medium. The phrase is commonplace in the company’s paid media as well, suggesting that it’s plenty capable of getting folks to open their wallets. With anime’s audience growing so much, I think there’s a level of selective signaling going on here, and it probably is a nice way to counter all of Netflix’s recent efforts in the PR war to gain the title of “the king of anime.” - Miles A.

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Crunchyroll Says Anime’s ChatGPT Subtitling Came From Third-Party Vendor, Goes Against Its Policies (Aftermath)

The summer 2025 anime season started off with a major overseas controversy about AI translation. The fan backlash and quick Crunchyroll response shows how anime fans are particular about AI. When people ask what makes anime, and other translated, non-English media so popular, it’s important to remember that translation is an essential part of this global art form overseas, both to the art itself and the community. - Klaudia A.

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Ones to Watch

READ: After We Gazed at the Starry Sky

After designing a planetarium’s brochure, graphic designer Subaru Miyazawa visits the planetarium and unexpectedly bumps into Tougo Awase, the famous photographer also involved in the project. As the two learn more about each other, they get closer than they ever could have imagined.

I love this manga because it normalizes disability, and showed me more about being disabled in Japan. The story is three volumes (two are out with the third on the way in English), making it a short read with an incredibly satisfying ending. - Leah T.

WATCH: There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover! Unless…

As a woman who loves yuri, there’s always a moment where I have to determine whether it’s a sapphic love story for the male gaze, or that actually has WLW in mind. The first episode of There’s No Freaking Way (abbreviated from its Japanese name to Watanare by fans) was so refreshing, with no fanservice and a wholesome take on a well-worn trope, of not being able to figure out your relationship with your girl best friend.

The MC has created a bubbly and friendly persona for herself in high school, after struggling to relate to other girls in middle school. She just wants to make friends, so when the popular girl in school admits she’s in love with her, she’s conflicted. It’s a delightfully relatable take on harem tropes as well, incorporating the real life feelings any awkward sapphic girl has had, with absolutely incredible animation. Plus it’s free to watch on YouTube every week! - Klaudia A.

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What Netflix Isn’t Telling You About Its Anime Viewership

For most of the streaming era, Netflix, Disney, Amazon, and other major streamers have only published “datecdotes” – selectively publicized figures about viewership that fit into a larger PR strategy, without having to give up the full picture of what people are actually watching on their platforms. For the last few years, however, this situation has improved somewhat: following the lead of Netflix, most streaming platforms now publish a daily “top ten” on a country-by-country basis, often splitting out TV and film as well.

Even more critically, Netflix started sharing viewership hours across their entire library every six months, something we’ve covered a few times before in this newsletter. But the form and format of the data provided is quite rough. Even on the weekly top 10s shared, Netflix’s “views” statistic doesn’t actually represent unique viewers, and has quirks that make it a surprisingly misleading way to compare the performance of two titles on the platform. Even with these big gestures for transparency, Netflix viewership data is still mostly obscured.

It was within this streaming data landscape that Netflix recently released an assertive, flag-planting proclamation that the streaming giant is “fueling a new era of global storytelling” with their anime slate. This PR piece is the mother of all datecdotes, and like so many others we’ve seen from streaming companies in the last decade, it obfuscates as much information as it provides. So today, we’ll dig into several specific claims to see how anime actually fares on Netflix when it's under the spotlight.

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[Normally, the rest of our main story would be behind the paywall, but this week, it’s free for all readers! Make sure to subscribe to support our work.]

1. “With over 50% of global Netflix members watching anime, the genre is reaching more audiences around the world than ever before.”

The most striking part about this statement is how old it is! According to Netflix’s then-lead of anime in 2022, “more than half of our members globally tuned into [anime] last year.” It’s hard to know if this has been true in the years between 2021 and now, but if I had to guess, it’s probably been under that threshold, or it would have come up as a talking point again since.

What’s more interesting about this statistic to me is how excited it made the press. Like I said, this isn’t new, but the volume and variety of outlets who have covered it goes far beyond those who normally cover Netflix’s animation news. The last time the 50% statistic came up, it was mostly confined to anime-specific outlets. But this time? I’ve got to give credit to Netflix – their PR team really pulled all the right levers here, but it definitely helps that this is a sexy headline sure to get clicks.

But is this number accurate? Yes, but with an important caveat. Netflix has perhaps been the most aggressive company to use “anime” as a marketing term for titles made outside of Japan. In its native Japan, “anime” is a catch-all term for animation, and has no specific consideration for country of origin. But in the overseas anime audience, the word is most often associated with titles produced in Japan. By using the classification to market titles like Castlevania and Blood of Zeus, it provides some additional cultural cache, even if it’s not representative of the storytelling culture these series were created within.

So when Netflix says “over 50% of global Netflix members [are] watching anime”, they’re also including titles like Arcane and Castlevania: Nocturne. While these series perform better than 95%+ of individual Netflix exclusive anime, when it comes to estimated viewership or hours watched across the entire medium of anime, they’re essentially a rounding error.

Prior to Anime Expo 2025, the majority of mentions of the word “anime” by Netflix’s PR operations and marketing over the last few years referred to titles produced in Austin or Seoul. It’s interesting to see that change with this press release, which features an image from Castlevania: Nocturne but does not mention any by name.

If we are to take the “50%” figure seriously, it means that the average anime viewer is watching an average of an hour of anime on Netflix each week – less than the average Crunchyroll user spends on that platform per day.

2. “In 2024 alone, anime was viewed over 1B times on Netflix, with viewership tripling over the past five years.”

Overall, the worldwide anime audience has tripled in the last five years. As discussed in our recent delve into Crunchyroll’s subscriber growth, the anime-focused streamer has experienced a similar rate of growth in its subscriber count.

Netflix only began publishing its full reports from 2023 onward, but based on the top 10 data from the few years before that, anime is just as well represented. New titles are doing just as well as they have in the past, but the real differences can be found in catalog acquisitions and Asian subscriber expansion.

While anime rarely makes it to a daily or weekly top 10 in North America and Europe, in Asia and Latin America, the top 10 titles are overflowing with anime. Over nearly 20% of Netflix’s subscribers are in Asia, and it’s no surprise that territories like Japan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Indonesia are rarely without a few anime titles in their most-watched lists.

In the last five years, Netflix has become one of the biggest platforms for currently-airing anime in Japan, a country with a 90% anime viewership rate on the platform. The APAC region has consistently been one of the biggest areas of subscriber growth for Netflix in the last five years, only fueling this number further.

This is all to say that if Netflix’s anime viewership didn’t triple over the last five years, based on larger trends related to anime and its ballooning APAC audience, it’d be strange.

3. “Japanese content is the world's second most-watched non-English content, with anime as a major driver.”

This is something of an understatement! In 2024, anime made up more than 70% of content produced in Japan on Netflix, per White Box analysis of Netflix’s publicly available viewership numbers. Now, that figure becomes more complicated when you only look at Netflix exclusives: anime’s share of Japanese content amongst new releases for the year was only 40%.

This is, largely, because Netflix exclusive anime are not a very large portion of Netflix’s anime viewership, accounting for just over 18% of total hours viewed. In 2024, more hours were spent on Netflix watching One Piece, Naruto, and Demon Slayer than every Netflix exclusive anime combined, past and present.

4. “In the first half of this year alone, eight anime titles made our Global Top 10 (Non-English) List.”

The “non-English” lists are considered by Netflix to be junior varsity level, compared to the English lists’ varsity level. If the lists were not separated, Sakamoto Days would have only made the global top 10 once during its first cour.

Also, half of these titles only stuck around for one week, with the latest entry in the popular My Hero Academia franchise, My Hero Academia: You're Next, scarcely making the top 10 its release week, despite exclusivity in Netflix’s biggest territories.

In 2025 so far, there have been 214 unique films and tv shows that have made the top 10 non-English TV or film lists on Netflix. Anime only accounts for 3.7% of them – less than its share of viewership on Netflix in 2024. This is why I don’t find this Global Top 10 statistic particularly impressive, because it highlights how hard of a time Netflix is having getting new anime to break through.

5. “80-90% of our members watch dubbed anime.”

This quote is being misunderstood by many to mean that 80-90% of members are watching anime exclusively dubbed. I have no doubt in the veracity of this claim, but the phraseology here is very specific for a reason. Netflix wants to give that impression to demonstrate their added value to these titles. But there’s a few complications here.

First, the majority of TV viewers, in most countries, are likely to engage in second screen activities. If you’re going to be browsing Instagram or shopping on your phone while watching anime, you don’t want to have to read subtitles.

Second, in our research on anime pirate sites, English-speaking audiences watch anime much more in Japanese the year an anime comes out, but as time progresses, the English dub is preferred. However, that means for the top echelon of titles, the majority of piracy viewers watch anime dubbed, because they keep gaining more and more viewers over time. Only the most entrenched fans, who want to see new anime as soon as possible, are the most likely to want to experience it in Japanese – or are forced to, because the dub is not yet available.

Plus, on streaming services like Netflix, if the dub is available, that’s what plays automatically. Netflix has also trained this dub watching behavior—up until recently with some simulcasts on a dub delay, most of their titles were released with the dub simultaneously, a practice Netflix hasn’t been able to do universally as they scale up their simulcast offerings.

6. “Sakamoto Days ranked in the top 10 for weeks across countries like the U.S., France, and Germany.”

This one is more clearly disingenuous. Sakamoto Days is indeed one of the best performing new anime of the last several years on Netflix, even if its momentum started to sag earlier than most weekly released series. It was on 67 different countries’ weekly top 10 lists at its peak…but it only spent a single week at the top of Germany or the U.S.’ lists.

There are dozens of countries Netflix could have chosen to pull out as an example here, including a half dozen Asian countries where Sakamoto Days was the #1 show for weeks at one point. But the narrative Netflix is seeking here is focused on western countries like the U.S., that historically don’t watch as much anime as they do other Netflix shows and films.

This is a fairly dishonest representation of how popular Sakamoto Days is, from my vantage point. It’s definitely still impressive—besides Dan Da Dan’s similarly short tenure on the U.S. top 10 last October, Sakamoto Days is the only anime to crack Netflix’s biggest territory in the last eighteen months. But the wording here implies that it’s been a massive hit in the U.S. and Germany, and that’s just not the case.

7. “The breakout success of the live action One Piece nearly doubled U.S. sales of the manga’s first volume.”

I wrote a piece for Comics Beat about this topic last summer, so I don’t need to rehash it at length here. While Netflix’s One Piece live action was a big part of the manga’s stellar year, the bigger factor was the hype built up by Luffy’s latest transformation. I think it’s pretty bizarre that Netflix’s #1 show wasn’t able to actually double the manga’s first volume sales year-over-year considering just how many people watched it, but I think that speaks to how Netflix anime typically have a lower conversion rate to merchandise and manga sales, due to the way most people absent-mindedly consume media on the platform.

Overall, I wrote today’s analysis because I haven’t seen much skepticism in the wider entertainment or anime industry about Netflix’s most recent stats, and I think it’s worth thinking through them. Netflix isn’t making anything up here, but that doesn’t mean they’re wholly representing the truth, either. - Miles A.