Crunchyroll President Sees Untapped Market of 800 Million Anime Fans Worldwide
Crunchyroll’s chief Rahul Parini sat down with The Verge on a wide-ranging interview, and gave plenty of answers on the future of the anime streaming service.
Crunchyroll is following its own path to streaming success. According to a survey from Polygon, 42% of Gen Z audiences and 25% of millennials watch anime at least once a week, and that means there’s a large untapped market for Crunchyroll to pursue, even with the 13 million paid subscribers it now claims. Speaking with The Verge, Crunchyroll president Rahul Purini revealed that there was a much wider audience waiting in the wings for his streamer, and it’s his job to find ways to bring his content to those customers.
- Purini doesn’t anticipate taking measures like password-sharing crackdowns or bringing ads to Crunchyroll to boost revenues.
- The streamer is rolling out to more and more smart TVs in an effort to seek out customers where they are.
- Wider distribution, a free streaming channel and multiple tiers with different features are all parts of Crunchyroll’s plan to lure its addressable audience.
Purini knows full well that his streamer caters to a more niche audience than a platform like Netflix or Hulu. That’s just the way he prefers it, in fact, and he knows that a streaming service like Netflix which carries anime can lead passionate viewers to want to dive deeper. That’s a big reason he sees so much potential for growth from his streaming service.
“We have research that shows that there’s about 800 million people that are anime aware, anime interested, and watching anime outside of China and Japan,” Purini told The Verge. “So that’s a huge [total addressable market]. So for us, we feel like there’s opportunity to grow and continue to grow, even being singularly focused on this audience.
A survey from 2022 showed that anime was one of the fastest-growing content genres over the preceding two years, so it’s clear that there is a large addressable market of anime fans out there. Whether it’s as large as Purini estimates remains to be seen, but his streamer’s recent moves show that he wants to find his audience where it is.
How Will Crunchyroll Continue Growing?
The strategy for growth at Crunchyroll has been fairly easy to observe, especially lately. The streamer recently became available through the Prime Video Channels digital store, and its apps have spread to Samsung Smart TVs and LG sets in the past month.
One area where Crunchyroll may want to improve its distribution is through mobile phones. During the interview with The Verge, Purini acknowledged that his streamer’s mobile app gets poor feedback from customers thanks to crashes and other service interruptions, and says that there are dedicated teams “focused” on providing a better mobile experience and solving these bugs.
But Purini may want to enlarge those teams if he truly wants to scale Crunchyroll. According to the survey from Polygon, 58% of Gen Z anime fans are Crunchyroll subscribers. Data recently released by Hub Research shows that almost 90% of Gen Z viewers watch video on their phones every week, and having a mobile app that functions correctly is key for a streaming service that is so saturated with Gen Z subscribers.
The Crunchyroll president also spoke about how his company’s free ad-supported TV (FAST) channel which launched in October is helping to bring new fans into the fold. Purini said that it was an important part of his strategy, allowing anime-curious viewers to find something they liked without having to commit their dollars first.
“For those fans that are not ready to be paying subscribers, we want them to continue to watch anime, engage with it, and we want to build a relationship with them. So the FAST channel allows us to do that as well,” he said.
This is especially important for a niche streamer like Crunchyroll, which is highly unlikely to be the only streaming service in a given customer’s stack. Recent surveys have shown that the average number of paid streaming services customers subscribe to at once is continuing to fall as prices rise, and FAST channels are increasingly filling the gaps left by such declines. Giving viewers a way to stream Crunchyroll’s content on free streaming platforms is a great way to convince them to follow their passions and sign up for the paid service.
Finally, Purini discussed the compensation that Funimation users would be able to get for their deleted digital libraries. Funimation’s library is set to merge with Crunchyroll on April 2, and some viewers may lose access to titles they previously owned. From Purini’s words, it sounds as if viewers will simply have to contact customer service if they want to be compensated for their former digital copies of shows and movies, since the company is trying to tailor its response to the individual user.
“It could be that they get access to a digital copy on any of the existing other services where they might be able to access it,” Purini told The Verge. “It could be a discount access to our subscription service so they can get access to the same shows through our subscription service. So we are trying to make it right based on each user’s preference.”
Crunchyroll has an undeniably impressive subscriber base for a streamer with such a narrow content focus. But its executives don’t see any reason for that narrow focus to hold back its customer base, and as it spreads to more smart TVs and digital platforms, Crunchyroll is trying to meet that audience where it is. But the company will have to improve its mobile apps if it wants to gain more Gen Z viewers, which should be a clear goal considering how many of them watch anime.
Crunchyroll
Crunchyroll is a subscription video streaming service catering to fans of anime with over 30,000 episodes. Viewers can see new episodes of shows one hour after they air in Japan, and read hundreds of chapters across dozens of manga titles. Some of their more popular titles are Dragon Ball Super, Attack on Titan, and Fire Force.