The Opportunity Gap
These trends reveal a crucial disconnect in the anime industry: while international markets and highly engaged fans are driving growth, the industry's structure remains anchored in traditional Japanese distribution models. This creates three key opportunities:
Untapped Fan Participation: Despite their deep engagement and willingness to invest time and energy into anime, fans currently lack meaningful ways to participate in and benefit from an anime's success. The gap between fan passion and participation opportunities represents a significant untapped market.
Global Distribution Friction: The surge in international demand highlights the inefficiencies of current distribution models, which weren't designed for global scale. A platform that can streamline global access while maintaining proper rights management could capture significant value.
Community-Creator Disconnect: While fans demonstrate unprecedented levels of engagement with content, they remain separated from creators by multiple industry layers. This separation represents an opportunity to create new value by enabling direct creator-fan relationships.
The convergence of these factors – rapid international growth, intensely engaged fans, and outdated industry structures – creates an ideal environment for innovation. As anime continues its trajectory to surpass 1 billion fans worldwide, the opportunity exists to fundamentally reimagine how fans, creators, and the industry interact. Oshi is positioned to bridge these gaps, creating an ecosystem that aligns with anime's increasingly global and participatory future.
tl;dr
There’s a massive chasm between anime’s global hype and the lagging infrastructure which can’t keep up. Creators want direct connection with their fans. Fans want deeper involvement. Right now, the middlemen are limiting the potential for next-level storytelling and community engagement. Web3 is how we fill the gap—cut out the gatekeepers, give creators direct access to a worldwide fanbase, and let fans directly back the universes they love. By bridging this gap, we’re turning anime from a passive pastime into a collaborative and rewarding phenomenon that can evolve at breakneck speed.
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