Why is Anime Getting More Popular in the West?

These are good days in the anime business, especially in the West. More shows are reaching a wider audience than ever. Japan is really starting to take Western audiences and their viewership seriously, and starting to depend on revenue coming from Western fans again.

At the heart of all of these trends is the revolution of online streaming, either legally or otherwise. For years, anime consumption was being held back by the inherent cludginess of needing to be delivered on a VHS tape or DVD, and we didn't even know it. Fans had to hunt down and buy anime in order to see it, often not knowing if they'd like it or not. To discover anime, they'd have to stumble across a (rare) TV broadcast, or be introduced to it through a friend. If those fans were unlucky enough to live in a place where there were no shops around that stocked a decent selection of anime (or a country that didn't have local anime publishers), they were often completely out of luck.

No longer. The fact that you can watch most anime, for free, any time, anywhere, drastically changed both the amount of anime people watched, and what they chose to watch.

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