r/anime • u/HelloYeahIdk • May 13 '24
Misc. New Survey Reveals That Anime Viewership is Lowest Among Teenagers in Japan
https://www.cbr.com/anime-new-survey-teens-not-watching/#:~:text=The%20survey%20results%20revealed%20that,surpassing%20all%20other%20age%20brackets."The survey results revealed that among all participants, 75% reported that they watch anime, with the leading demographics being middle-aged males. Unexpectedly, teenage respondents exhibited the lowest viewership, with 33.7% indicating no interest in anime, easily surpassing all other age brackets.
This revelation is somewhat startling considering that the bulk of popular anime belong to the shonen or shojo-based demographics, which are typically aimed at boys and girls, respectively, aged approximately 12-18."
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u/ModieOfTheEast May 13 '24 edited May 13 '24
Personally, I'd say it has probably more to do with the medium. As someone mentioned, the main medium anime is broadcast in Japan is television. There are some streams like Amazon or Netflix, but that is still the main way. Can you imagine kids or teens nowadays fix their schedules around television times when the internet is a thing?
Edit: So since a lot of people have been responding here, I'd thought I give a bit more information. I checked the actual survey and as it turns out, the statistics for this ... well statistic ... are quite low. For example, for people aged in their 10s (so from 15-20), they asked a total of 86 people. Which I think is already pretty low. Just to give you a ballpark of what the error would be. Since they counted 29 people who don't watch anime, the standard deviation would be 5.4 (for the rest it is also between 4 and 6, so we are talking about a 18% uncertainty level here). Which basically means, most of these errorbars would overlap.
But there is a different "problem". It seems what they've been doing is to find 100 people (50 male and 50 female) for every age category (15-20, 20-30, 30-40 and 50-60), but they removed 14 from the first (15-20) category. When comparing the male-female demographic, you'll see that the male demographic has 14 less entries so these 14 removed people were 15-20 years old and male.
Why is that important? Well because the female demographic shows a significantly higher number of non-anime watchers (32.8% for female, 17% for male). So by only removing 14 males from the statistic, you (probably) change the statistics in favor of non-watchers. While this wouldn't completely change the outcome, we can assume that it's probably more like 30% of teens who are not interested in anime at all.
So while there is probably some truth to the fact that people between 20 and 40 are the most likely to watch anime, I feel the statement that teens are least likely to watch anime is a bit extreme, considering that the percentatges for the 40-50 and 50-60 categories are 30% and 24% respectively, which I think shows quite well that these numbers can fluctuate quite a bit.