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 disconnect opens up three key opportunities:

1. Untapped Fan Participation: Despite their deep engagement and willingness to invest time and energy, fans still lack meaningful ways to participate in and benefit from an anime’s success. The gap between fan passion and participation represents a major untapped market.

2. 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 streamlines global access while maintaining proper rights management will unlock significant value.

3. Community-Creator Disconnect: While fans demonstrate unprecedented levels of engagement, they remain separated from creators by multiple industry layers. Bridging this gap offers a chance to build new value through direct creator-fan relationships.

The convergence of these factors, rapid international growth, deeply engaged fans and outdated structures, creates an ideal environment for innovation.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

Anime is growing rapidly across the globe, but the systems behind it haven’t kept pace. Fans want more than just watching. They want to feel involved in the worlds they care about. Creators crave deeper connection, greater visibility, and room to tell their stories on their own terms. But outdated infrastructure and layers of intermediaries hold that potential back. By bridging this gap, we can help anime evolve from a passive experience into a deeply collaborative and rewarding phenomenon.