Publish date: 9h and 46m ago
In 2024, Japan’s anime industry earned more from audiences abroad than from audiences at home.
The Association of Japanese Animations (AJA) put the global anime market at 3.84 trillion yen, about $25 billion, up 14.8% on the year, in initial findings released at the TIFFCOM content market and reported by Screen Daily. Overseas revenue was 2.17 trillion yen, up 26%. Domestic revenue was 1.67 trillion yen, up about 3%.
A fandom that large does more than buy tickets and subscriptions. It produces its own culture, and some of that culture becomes the raw material for independent creators, including adults who work on subscription platforms.
The numbers behind the export
The AJA figures make one thing plain: the center of gravity has moved. Overseas revenue was about 1.3 times the domestic figure, which is simple arithmetic on 2.17 and 1.67 trillion yen. Screen Daily’s account of the report also notes that the overseas figure first passed the domestic one in 2020, and that the total market has more than doubled from 1.64 trillion yen in 2014, a rise of about 2.3 times on those two figures.
The money is not spread evenly across the industry. The same report put sales of anime production companies alone at 466.2 billion yen, about $3 billion, with 119 billion yen of it from overseas, roughly a quarter on simple arithmetic. The larger totals include merchandise and other anime-related spending, and a credit-research survey cited in the story found that 20.9% of production companies saw revenue fall in 2024. The fandom is booming faster than some of the studios that feed it.
Japan’s government wants more of it. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) proposed a target of 20 trillion yen in overseas market size for Japanese content by 2033, at its Entertainment and Creative Industrial Policy Seminar in October 2025, Automaton reported. Screen Daily described the goal as more than four times the current level. The target covers games and other content as well as anime.
Print travels too
Anime is the visible export; manga is its print counterpart. In the United States, about 21.8 million of the 44.7 million graphic novels sold in 2023 were manga, almost 49%, according to a BookScan-based analysis summarized by Publishers Weekly in April 2024. The same piece quoted Circana BookScan as saying unit sales from January through September 2023 were 351% higher than in the same period of 2019.
The article also said US manga sales had quadrupled since 2020, though the rapid rise has since tapered off, a reminder that fandom growth is not a straight line. Those numbers describe a reading habit, not a creator economy. They matter because reading habits are where characters, genres and visual styles become familiar to people who have never been to Japan.
From audience to participation
Fandom is participatory. Fans draw, write, dress up, edit and organize, and the creators who work closest to a fandom tend to borrow its vocabulary: character-inspired looks, genre tropes, in-jokes and the aesthetics of a particular era of animation.
Adult creators who work in anime-inspired niches are part of that pattern. They draw on the same cultural reference points as everyone else in the fandom, and their audiences arrive already fluent in them. All of the creators discussed here are adults, the characters they portray are adults as well, and the fandom they borrow from is a mainstream one with a broad international audience.
No census measures how large this niche is. OnlyGuider estimated global OnlyFans revenue at $7.2 billion in 2025, up 9%, according to Protothema’s coverage of the data. But that figure covers the entire platform, and it is an estimate: WKRN, a Nexstar station, described OnlyGuider’s method in separate coverage as reportedly using search traffic, population data and revenue filings. Nothing in it separates anime-inspired work from any other kind.
Where geography and fandom meet
One suggestive data point comes from Asia. In OnlyGuider’s city data, Xataka Mexico reported that Hong Kong, Shanghai, Nagoya and Tokyo posted growth of 27% to 30% in 2025, a range the outlet did not break out by city. The outlet described those cities as only beginning to spend on the platform.
That tells us the market in Japan’s own cities is growing, not that anime drives it. Correlation between a national export and local spending is too loose to carry a conclusion, and no source reviewed here links the two.
What creators and fans should keep in mind
Working with characters that belong to someone else raises practical questions. Rights holders, publishers and platforms each set their own rules about fan-made and derivative material, and those rules differ by company and by country. Creators should read the current terms of every platform they use and seek professional advice on intellectual property, not rely on how common a practice looks.
For fans, the useful distinction is between inspiration and imitation. Plenty of creators borrow a visual style or a genre mood without reproducing a specific character, and the more original the work, the more durable it tends to be. That last point is an editorial observation, not a measured result.
Creator directories file this work under its own heading. One such category page covers hentai models, which gives fans a way to see how the niche is defined.
The next AJA report will show whether overseas revenue keeps pulling ahead. If it does, the fandom export will keep widening the audience for everyone who builds on it.