[quote=Fortune Magazine]The numbers in mainstream entertainment are bad: Hollywood box-office receipts are down 7% over last year's middling performance. Home video, which in the past couple of years accounted for about a quarter of the profits on average at the major studios, is losing its shine too. Goldman Sachs forecasts virtually no growth in DVD sales for the major studios in 2006 and an outright decline in sales the year after that. In TV land, prime viewers are fleeing prime time: The networks have seen a 7.4% drop in viewings by 18- to 49-year-olds so far this fall compared with last year. There are plenty of reasons for these declines—fickle tastes, videogames, piracy. But there's also the fact that, frankly, the entertainment industry tends not to show the fans much love. Any business that prices popcorn the way gas stations price gas, encodes software into its CDs that compromises computer security, or persists in building sitcoms around Jim Belushi needs work in staying close to customers. Yet with anime and its print cousin—the paperback-sized cartoon books called manga—the otaku keep showing up, cash in hand. This tidy little corner of the show-biz universe—a market worth more than $625 million last year at retail in North America, of which AD Vision captured $150 million—makes for a rare example of an entertainment niche that does more than not alienate its customers: It has found ways to keep them buying and buying.
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What draws them in? These cartoons all have a soap opera appeal: Plots build over the course of an unusually long season (typically 52 episodes, vs. 13 or so for traditional U.S. shows), as characters die, fall in love, do dumb things.
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None of this means that Western culture is going all-anime. Ledford acknowledges that interest seems to bubble up, then fall back a bit before growing again. Certainly the aging of the Pok�mon generation—the first to have widespread exposure to anime at a young age—should help. Still, Ledford figures that if he can just keep up with the fans, the industry will take care of itself—and the fans will take care of ADV. "Everybody here in some capacity loves anime very passionately, or they love manga," says Ledford. "We've got businesspeople here who could care less—every company does—but you go to some of these big, mega-conglomerate media companies, and they go, 'Oh, anime is making lots of money.' But then they get into it and they don't do it right because they're not connected to the fans."[/quote]
There's also some interesting stuff about how file-sharing is being used to popularize anime.
Check it out.
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