Today’s niche interest can become tomorrow’s major market.
That sounds obvious in hindsight. Once something has millions of customers, global distribution, major corporate investment, and widespread cultural recognition, it’s easy to see why businesses want to participate. The harder question is whether the opportunity was visible years earlier, when the audience was smaller but already unusually enthusiastic.
Anime offers a compelling example.
For longtime anime and donghua fan Elijah Ladapo, the change is particularly noticeable because anime once occupied a very different place in American popular culture. Finding particular series could require considerably more effort, and being an enthusiastic anime fan was far more likely to identify someone as belonging to a specialized subculture.
Today, anime appears across the largest streaming platforms, fills convention centers, inspires major brand collaborations, drives merchandise and game sales, and reaches audiences worldwide.
“The audience didn’t suddenly become passionate once anime became mainstream,” Ladapo says. “The passion was already there. What changed was how easy it became for more people to discover it and participate in it.”
This difference offers a useful business lesson. A niche’s size today doesn’t necessarily tell us how large it can become. Sometimes the more revealing question is how deeply the existing audience cares.
Anime’s Numbers No Longer Look Niche
The scale of anime’s current audience would have been difficult to imagine during earlier periods of its growth in the United States.
In 2025, Netflix reported that more than half of its global members watch anime. The company said anime was viewed more than one billion times on Netflix in 2024, with viewership tripling over the previous five years.
Research from Dentsu points in the same direction. Its global Consumer Navigator research, based on 8,600 consumers across 10 countries, found that roughly three in 10 consumers watch anime at least weekly. Among Gen Z and Millennials, that figure rises to 50 percent.
The economics have grown alongside the audience.
The Association of Japanese Animations reported that the anime market reached approximately 3.84 trillion yen in 2024, another record. The overseas market accounted for about 2.17 trillion yen, substantially exceeding the domestic market of 1.67 trillion yen.
Those aren’t the numbers of a small entertainment subculture anymore.
But the more interesting business question is how something gets from one stage to the other.
Small Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Weak
Companies understandably focus on market size.
If one category has 50 million potential customers and another has 500,000, the larger market initially looks more attractive. But audience size is only one variable.
Engagement matters too.
A relatively small group of people who enthusiastically discuss, recommend, collect, create, travel, and spend around an interest may offer a stronger foundation for expansion than a much larger group with only casual interest.
Anime fandom has long exhibited many of those characteristics.
Fans didn’t simply watch shows. They debated characters and storylines, collected manga and merchandise, created fan art, cosplayed, attended conventions, played games based on favorite properties, and recommended series to friends.
Those behaviors create something valuable: an infrastructure around an interest.
The community helps new people discover the product. Experienced fans guide newcomers toward things they might enjoy. Events provide physical gathering places. Online groups keep conversations going between releases. Merchandise provides additional ways to participate.
The audience becomes part of the distribution mechanism.
Barriers Can Hide Demand
A niche can also remain small because it’s hard to reach, not because demand is inherently limited.
Anime historically faced obvious barriers outside Japan.
Availability was inconsistent. Localization took time. Some series were difficult to obtain legally. Viewers without subtitles had fewer options. Television schedules determined which programs reached American audiences, meaning the available selection represented only a fraction of what existed.
Streaming changed many of those conditions.
A viewer can now discover an unfamiliar series and begin watching within minutes. Netflix says its anime releases can launch simultaneously worldwide, with dubbed audio and audio descriptions available in as many as 33 languages. The company reports that 80 to 90 percent of its members who watch anime use dubbed versions, illustrating how localization can broaden accessibility.
That suggests an important distinction for businesses evaluating specialized markets: Sometimes a small audience indicates limited demand. Other times, it indicates friction.
If technology, distribution, price, translation, geography, or social perceptions are keeping potential customers away, removing those barriers can reveal a much larger market than the original numbers suggested.
Niche Audiences Can Do the Early Marketing
Passionate communities have another advantage. They teach newcomers how to enter.
Anime can be intimidating to someone unfamiliar with it because “anime” describes an enormous range of storytelling. Someone who dislikes one series might love another.
Existing fans help solve that problem.
They ask what kinds of stories someone already enjoys. Action? Romance? Horror? Comedy? Martial arts? Fantasy? Sports? Long-form character development?
Then they recommend accordingly.
Ladapo does exactly this with Chinese donghua. Battle Through the Heavens is one of his favorite recommendations because of its long-form progression, martial arts, cultivation system, mentorship, and gradual character development. Someone interested in those qualities has an immediate entry point.
That kind of peer recommendation is commercially powerful because it reduces uncertainty for newcomers.
A niche community can therefore function as a decentralized onboarding system. Its most enthusiastic members explain terminology, suggest good starting points, answer questions, and introduce others to the interest without being paid.
Businesses evaluating emerging markets should pay attention when they see that behavior.
Mainstream Success Doesn’t Require Erasing What Made Something Different
Another interesting aspect of anime’s growth is this.
It didn’t become globally successful by turning itself into conventional American entertainment.
Anime still carries distinctive visual traditions, storytelling structures, cultural references, character archetypes, and genres. Those differences can be part of the attraction.
Dentsu’s 2025 global research found that the leading reason respondents chose anime over other content was their enjoyment of unique worlds and stories they didn’t find elsewhere.
That’s worth considering because businesses sometimes assume that reaching a larger audience requires making a specialized product increasingly generic.
The opposite can happen.
Distinctiveness gives people a reason to choose something in the first place. If a product becomes indistinguishable from everything already available, expanding its potential audience may come at the cost of weakening its original appeal.
The challenge is often to make a niche more accessible without losing its distinctiveness.
Anime’s expansion through streaming and localization demonstrates the difference. Subtitles, dubbing, simultaneous releases, and global distribution reduce barriers to entry. They don’t require the underlying stories to stop being Japanese.
Elijah Ladapo: Look for Intensity Before Scale
None of this means every niche is destined to become mainstream.
Some interests remain specialized for good reasons, and a highly enthusiastic audience doesn’t ensure that millions of other people share the same underlying preferences.
Businesses still have to evaluate economics, competition, scalability, and actual demand.
But early market analysis can become misleading when current audience size receives all the attention.
A better assessment might also ask:
How frequently do existing customers engage?
Do they recommend the product without being prompted?
Are they creating communities around it?
Do they spend money across multiple related categories?
Are people willing to travel to events centered on the interest?
Are they creating their own content?
And perhaps most importantly, are there potential customers who might participate if existing barriers disappeared?
“Passion is worth paying attention to because people reveal what they value through what they’re willing to invest in,” Ladapo says. “If people are spending their time discussing something, introducing friends to it, traveling for it, creating around it, and staying interested for years, I wouldn’t dismiss that community simply because it isn’t huge yet.”
Today’s Edge Can Become Tomorrow’s Center
Markets don’t come fully formed. They begin with groups of people who care about something before everyone else understands why.
Technology can make that interest easier to access. Distribution can expand. Social perceptions can change. Existing fans can introduce newcomers. Companies can invest once they recognize the opportunity, and each development makes the next stage of growth easier.
Eventually, what once looked unusual begins to look ordinary.
Anime’s transformation doesn’t provide a formula that every niche market can follow. It does, though, offer a useful reminder of how businesses evaluate emerging opportunities. Large audiences are easy to notice, whereas small, intensely engaged ones require more imagination. And sometimes the clearest signal of a future mainstream market isn’t how many people have discovered something yet. It’s how much the people who already found it care.
