Crunchyroll has just garnered $22 million in funding from Otter Media in a bid to expand their engineering division and focus on original content.
Crunchyroll says that it now has 20 million registered users, and expects to have 750,000 paid subscribers by the end of 2015. 80% of all users speak English and come from the North American market. They watch the equivalent of 1.5 billion minutes of anime each month.
Some of the funding will be used to finance a new initiative between Crunchyroll and Japanese trading company Sumitomo Corporation. Last month the two sides announced that they were launching a joint venture to create a company focused on funding anime co-production projects. This may lead to more original content, which is more lucrative than just securing foreign rights from Japanese anime providers.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
