How The Anime Industry Makes Money:
Most anime studios are contractors. Meaning, the production committee puts together a budget and hires a studio to work on the anime. Typically a studio doesn’t get to choose the anime they work on but are paid upfront for the work.
The industries three largest revenue streams are merchandising, international licensing, and anime-themed pachinko machines. The three lowest revenue streams are Japanese home video, Japanese digital distribution, and anime related music sales. Notice the trend?
Due to the increased demand, the Japanese anime industry is currently marked by a high number of shows that are aired every year. Newly broadcasted television animation programs clearly outnumber continuously broadcasted animation programs, which leads to a high turnover of shows.
One of the reasons animators have low wages is due to the production and sheer amount of animators employed with some projects having over 100 artists! Of course, studios do manage their finances. They try to save profits from past hits to help pay their employees or outsource to other studios if it’s cheaper.
Animes pay the channel to air the show and earns nothing in return. In other words, Anime on TV and websites is an advertisement of its merchandise. That's one of the reasons why anime isn't that big(at least in my opinion).
Anime brings in more than $19 billion a year. Its artists are earning barely enough to survive.
The salaries of Anime Artists in the US range from $36,930 to $113,600 , with a median salary of $63,970 . The middle 60% of Anime Artists makes $63,970, with the top 80% making $113,600.
The anime industry grew to 2.5112 trillion yen (around USD$24.08 billion) in 2019, according to the Association of Japanese Animations (AJA). This figure, a 15.1% rise on 2018, is an all-time high.
Animators were paid bottom rate on a recent Japanese production for Netflix, according to Ippei Ichii. The animator and storyboard artist took to Twitter to condemn the streaming giant, claiming that artists working on a Netflix show at Tokyo studio Mappa were paid as little as 3,800 (USD$34) per cut.
The main reason that a low-level animator's salary is so low is because they don't actually receive an hourly salary. Most studios pay out per frame, so that the pay is dependent on how much the animator is able to get done and also on how complicated the frame might be.
The Anime Market Shrinks For the First Time in 11 Years The market size in 2020 was 2.4 trillion (or 2,426.1 billion) yen, a 3.5% shrink compared to 2019. Nevertheless, the fact that it was a small-scale contraction can be actually seen as a positive surprise for the industry.
Nobody should be surprised to see Pokémon as the highest-grossing anime franchise of all time, bringing in over $99 billion and much more to come. The anime is so popular that it's still running, they have their own trading card game, and Nintendo is constantly bringing out new Pokémon video games.
$10 billionThe Naruto franchise has grossed more than $10 billion since its creation.
The Diverse Variety of Stories The wide range of genres in anime is the first reason why it is so popular. Every person enjoys a different story, genre, and style in anime! Romance, comedy, action/adventure, mystery/suspense, and horror are just a few of the many genres explored by anime plots.
If not for Japan, the global anime industry wouldn't even be born.
The first generation of animators in the late 1910s included Ōten Shimokawa, Jun'ichi Kōuchi and Seitaro Kitayama, commonly referred to as the "fathers" of anime.
This is one of the reasons anime is so expensive to buy in Japan. The studios are trying to make up for the lack of quantity sold at high prices.
How is that the anime industry posted a record 2 trillion yen revenue line, but anime studios are struggling to pay their artists? It’s because the actual anime itself isn’t profitable.
Committees are pretty simple – a group of entertainment companies comes together to fund an anime series. Every member specializes in a different area such as marketing, distribution, or merchandising and split the production costs. Keep in mind that production costs are not evenly split, which means certain members can make more money off of an anime’s success.
One of the reasons animators have low wages is due to the production and sheer amount of animators employed with some projects having over 100 artists! Of course, studios do manage their finances. They try to save profits from past hits to help pay their employees or outsource to other studios if it’s cheaper.
Most anime studios are contractors. Meaning, the production committee puts together a budget and hires a studio to work on the anime. Typically a studio doesn’t get to choose the anime they work on but are paid upfront for the work.
In 2015, licensing was the second largest revenue stream for the industry. This includes legal streaming and purchasing localized home video releases. Licensors don’t report the revenue splits (and they have no reason to), but a portion of it does go back to animation studios.
Piracy isn’t a zero-sum issue that can be easily solved. In fact, various academic studios from independent agencies have found that piracy has a minuscule effect on sales numbers for most industries since not all revenue streams can be pirated.
But the main source of anime creator’s profit is by publishing their work to a “Manga” company, which allows all the mentioned ways how they earn money possible. If they become a “hit”, they will be contacted and deals will be formed (not sure what kind of deals).
Us fans can also buy their volumes and merchandise to really support the industries we love. It isn't cheap, and the whole in our wallets and cards are going to be huge, but we have to help somehow.
Anime is slowly dying, and it’s devastatingly true. The industries are not getting enough fans for their respective anime, which in turn doesn't give them the revenue they need to sustain themselves.
Those anime website are under a legal gray area, since the content is not hosted by them (like the anime videos themselves as that would be grounds to a DMCA take down of the content), Most of these website just stream it from another source, which again is where the gray area comes in.
It’s not easy to make anime .The staff are severely underpaid while having to work monsterous hours a day. Meeting requirements is even more challenging now then ever. Even still, anime is also being illegally distributed via online streaming and companies aren't getting money from it.
Free anime websites are certainly not legal. But the have a long reach due to which even a small budget anime can reach a variety of audience quickly. If people like the anime they are open to buying dvds and merchandise to aid the creators of said anime.
What we can do isn't much, but as fans we can still contribute and possibly make a stand to save Anime and the anime industries from shutting down like those already.
Nowadays anime production is almost always managed by a “Production Committee”, which consists of a diverse set of companies, each taking a portion of the pie.
According to Masamune Sakaki, a CG creator in the anime industry, an average 13-episode anime season costs around 250 million yen (or $2 million). He also made it clear that most anime can't recoup this expense, and the industry rests on the windfall of a few big hits. In a July interview, Takayuki Nagatani, producer of Shirobako (itself an anime about anime production), claimed that his show cost 500 million yen (or $4 million) for 24 episodes. In order to make it sell, he had to "advertise it, plan events, and make merchandise." Shinji Takamatsu, a veteran animator, cited a figure of 150 to
In a July interview, Takayuki Nagatani, producer of Shirobako (itself an anime about anime production), claimed that his show cost 500 million yen (or $4 million) for 24 episodes. In order to make it sell, he had to "advertise it, plan events, and make merchandise.".
According to an investigation by Media Development Research Institute Inc., a 30 minute episode of a TV anime in 2010 that totaled 11,000,000 yen (about US $145,214 at the current exchange rate) consisted of the following expenses: (Note: All US dollar conversions are approximate based on current exchange rate.)
Anime studios are the actual anime makers, yet usually the least powerful in the industry . In most cases anime studios are not members in Production Committee, which means what it gets is simply a fixed amount to cover production fee. Of course there are exceptions like Studio Ghibli.
A late night anime can cost $5 million USD to produce, and that money has to be stretched to pay everyone working on the project. One of the reasons animators have low wages is due to the production and she
Many foreign animation studios get animators from Korea and Japan and bring them aboard instead of fighting with home grown Japanese studios that have the backing and funding.