Is it Possible to Make Money from Anime

I always dreamt of ideas to make money from anime related ventures ever since I was a wee little seventeen year old boy sitting in my bedroom watching Spice and Wolf. I knew that there must be some way to make this dream happen. Back then I was a literal weaboo, and I’m not talking about the false definition of weeb that we have today.

Today, a weeb seems to simply be someone who enjoys anime and has a single ounce of passion for it. Back in the day, a weeb, or weaboo, was someone who made anime their entire life and it was their everything.

A real weaboo is a non Japanese person who is so into anime that they worship the land of Japan. I would have thrown away my reality for a chance to live inside of an anime world in an instant. This isn’t that crazy though, a lot of people would do the same thing. It’s just what happens when you mix anime and mental health issues.

Anyways, the dream of making money from anime never came to fruition. It’s not like I tried very hard to make it happen, it’s more like reality set in after high school graduation and I put it on hold while pursuing something more reliable. It’s smart to pursue dreams while you’re already doing something to keep you afloat. In this society it’s too big of a gamble to go all in on most dreams. The risk of failure is often high, and you’re left with nothing in the case that you do. You’d be on the streets and probably not even be able to afford a device to stream your precious anime on.

After settling into my military career, making money through anime, moving to Japan, becoming Japanese myself, becoming a samurai, learning how to fly all seemed to fly down to the bottom of my list of priorities. It’s kind of sad how some of our childhood dreams die out as we enter society. Society is a burden on us in many ways, I still believe that even after all of these years. It tells us what is right and wrong, what is acceptable or not, limits us, burdens us, and shaves off our uniqueness as human beings.

Even thinking that society is bad as a whole makes you feel like some kind of loser, which is ironic. I do want to apologize for getting wholly off topic. You’re probably here because you want to know how you can make money from anime.

There are a few different ways that I know of for you to make money while being around the joy that is anime.

Make an Anime Related Blog

I feel like I’m able to touch on this method of making money from anime because it’s something that I’ve accomplished before and is something that I’m currently attempting. Do you want to know how much money I’ve made from my anime blog? Prepare yourself, you might be shocked. Fifty six cents. I know right, I’m currently drawing up plans to add a movie theater to my house with my earnings. But no seriously, money is money.

When you’ve made any amount of money doing something, you can scale up the operation ninety nine percent of the time. It’s just mathematics. If I were to triple my efforts, then on paper I could make a dollar fifty from my anime blog. The great thing about blogs though is that the growth isn’t linear but it’s more like a snowball effect. So if I was to put in three times the effort, the payoff will likely be much more than three times fifty cents in the long run.

How to Create your Blog

• Purchase a domain name. You can use popular places such as Godaddy or Namecheap to purchase a domain name for your website. They are usually around $10 for a year.

• Choose a content management system. While you could create your blog from scratch if you have the coding skills, it’s much easier to manage a blog with a preexisting content management system such as WordPress.
• Pick a theme for your blog and start writing content. Connect your blog to Google Analytics to track your progress. Create some socials around your blog such as Youtube and Facebook. Most importantly, have fun.

Earning Potential: 8/10. Using this method to make money from anime has the potential to bring large gains but the drawback is that it’s not going to happen over night. Or even after a few months, it’ll most likely take you two years or more to bring any significant amount of money to the table. For some, this is worth it, especially if you enjoy the ride like myself. About two thirds of my reasoning for running an anime blog is for the sheer enjoyment of it. Let’s put a number of $0 – $1,000,000+/y to the real potential earnings here.

Sell Anime Related Products to Make Money from Anime

There are a few different ways you can go about becoming an anime entrepreneur. You could sell anime affiliate products, physical anime merchandise, dropship anime goods, arbitrage, and things like that. I have experience with creating brands and sourcing physical products so I would be inclined to recommend that route. It’s nice to actually own the things that you sell, not only so you can control the quality, but you can have control over everything such as shipping times and product features.

You should choose a niche of anime related products that you want to sell, and find somewhere to purchase them in bulk. It would be wise to sample one of your products from your supplier before going all in and spending any significant amount of money. Some examples of different anime merchandise you could sell would be figurines, mouse pads, body pillows, and anime backpacks.

After you create your plan on what you’re going to sell and to whom, your focus will be on marketing. You should market your product to your target audience using a solid marketing plan. This could be running Google ad campaigns, Facebook ads, social media organic, SEO organic traffic, etc. The point is to just be consistent and stick with the plan.

Earning Potential: 10/10. The earning potential from a business venture like these is almost limitless. You could technically create an anime related brand that makes it onto the Fortune 500. You’re only limited to what you’re able to pull off. So the numbers you can pull in could range from $0 – $1,000,000,000+.

Utilizing Anime Art to Make Money from Anime

If you’re skilled in any sort of artistic nature, unlike myself, you might be able to leverage it to make money from anime related means. This could be designing anime t shirts for businesses, creating digital anime art for individuals, taking commissions, becoming a mangaka, or creating anime posters. There’s probably over a hundred different ways to use your artistic skills to make money from anime. If you’re an artist, you should be able to come up with something much better than what I can.

I believe that a venture like this should be one of those things that is started on the side of your already reliable thing. It’s a gamble because you don’t know yet if there will be a demand for what you decide to release into the world. If there is a demand, the pay off could be worth it and allow you to quit your day job. You have nothing to lose by giving it a shot in your free time.

Earning Potential: 5/10. You can visualize a lower earnings cap on this anime money making method. You are limited by your ability to only create a certain amount of things in a certain amount of time. It’s a lot harder to scale with this business model but if you’re able to provide high value items you could potentially earn as much as a brain surgeon or even more. I’d say that an anime artist could earn anywhere from $0 – $500,000/y.

Become an Anime Influencer

This is another broad category of another way to make money from anime. And in 2023, it’s actually a viable thing that one might think seriously about pursuing. An influencer can do their thing on a variety of different platforms and in different ways. For example, you could create anime content or you could react to anime content, or watch it and/or talk about it or review it.

Some different forms of anime influencer that could make you money include:

• Anime Youtuber. Youtubers make money through adsense ad revenue, sponsorships, affiliate commissions and more. If you build up enough of a following, you can make a significant amount of money from just doing things like anime reviews, skits, reactions, etc.
• Anime Social Media Account. This could be a Tiktok or Instagram account that is centered around anime. For the most part, the amount of followers will determine the amount of money you can make from social media accounts like these. If you make an anime Instagram page with anime reviews, you might get a sponsorship deal after having 50,000 followers, for example. If you want to read about my anime Instagram meme page you can do so by following this link.
• Anime Patreon: If you have something of value to offer the anime community, you might start a patreon account and see if anyone would be willing to subscribe. You can create different tiers that offer better and better perks depending on what you specialize in. Some anime reactors from Youtube create a patreon page where you can watch their reactions early by subscribing.

Earning Potential: 7/10. A large influencer account has the potential to make $5,000 per sponsored post or even more. The limits for an anime influencer are very high in 2023. If you were to become a popular Youtuber with atleast 100,000 subscribers you’d be justified in quitting whatever desk job you currently have and live a lavish lifestyle as an influencer. The only problem with this business model is the chance of failure. Again, you would want to start this as a side hustle in addition to your day job to see if it takes off. I’d put a number of $0 – $5,000,000+/y on this anime monkey making gig.

I hope you were able to learn something useful from this article and become inspired to turn your love of Japanese pixels into something productive, monetary, and valuable. Comment below your journey and how you’re going to make money from anime.

Good luck out there.

-Cross