Global Anime Market Continues To Surge, Up 15% to Record $25.1 Billion In 2024

By Elijah Gonzalez | October 30, 2025 | 2:00pm

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Global Anime Market Continues To Surge, Up 15% to Record $25.1 Billion In 2024

According to the industry group Association of Japanese Animations (AJA), 2024 was another impressive year of growth for the anime industry both domestically and abroad. This Thursday, the AJA reported that the global anime market grew to a record $25.1 billion in 2024. Of that, the Japanese market contributed $10.9 billion, while overseas markets accounted for $14.1 billion.

This marks a 14.8% increase for the overall market from 2023, and it’s the second-highest annual increase ever, behind only 2019’s 15.3%. The overseas market grew dramatically more than Japan’s domestic market, with the overseas market up 26% while the domestic market increased 2.8%. This marked the third year where the overseas market outstripped the domestic market, following 2020 and 2023.

AJA’s above calculations account for the total revenue of all anime-related products, including merchandising, events, concerts, and more. Revenue for the anime production side—the revenue generated by anime studios—grew by 9.1% to its highest ever of $3.025 billion, with $2.254 billion from domestic (a 6.7% increase) and $770.6 million from overseas (a 16.6% increase).

Masahiro Hasegawa, the editor-in-chief of the AJA’s upcoming Anime Industry Report 2025, explained the lower annual increase on the production side as a symptom of there being a time lag of a few years before revenues from sources like overseas streaming are reflected on the production side. The AJA will publish its full 2025 report in early December.

“The overseas market now far exceeds local revenues, and the gap will only widen,” Hasegawa said during the presentation. “Growth today includes bundled contracts that span theatrical, streaming, merchandising, and event rights — not just content distribution.”

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Meanwhile, the Japanese government is investing big in the anime industry via the Cool Japan initiative, a means of global soft power. The government has an action plan to double annual entertainment sales overseas from an estimated $65 billion in 2028 to $130 billion in 2023. That is over three times the sales in 2024 (about $39 billion). The Cool Japan Fund has contributed towards series like Chainsaw Man via bridge-financing, fronting the costs for MAPPA so that the studio could forgo the traditional production committee approach used to finance most anime—in turn, this gave MAPPA a much larger share of the profits and theoretically allowed the company to grow.

However, while anime revenue continues to soar, it’s clear that this has not significantly improved the working conditions for most animators, who were recently the subject of a UN report that accused the industry of subjecting workers to long hours, low wages, and other forms of exploitation. Hopefully, reforms are made so more of that $25.1 billion actually reaches the people making these shows.