Wow. It’s been a while since this column has started I think. Let’s just say some scheduling issues have reared its ugly head. It’s basically a case of me learning the best times to set everything up, and not doing a good job of thinking more into the future. I hope I can fix that in future installments.
In the return, Kim Cameron of Anime-Planet will grace this space. She’s the creator of AP, and from what started as a site to recommend or keep track of anime and manga and we’ve consumed has now become a growing space to watch legal anime thanks to partnerships with Crunchyroll, Hulu, Youtube, etc. Here’s what she has to say about AP’s start, how talking to a person at the defunct ADV got her into the anime and manga industry, and how AP evolved to include videos on the site. – Justin
Anime-Planet.com came about somewhat randomly. The site’s namesake comes from a series of hubs in Direct Connect (later to become DC++) called Anime Planet, where I used to hang out and chat; this was back in 2000-2001. I was a sophomore in college majoring in computer science, and enjoyed building websites and tinkering around with web technologies on the side. Time after time, people would ask in the Anime Planet chat “I like [this anime], what else would I like?” – and since I wanted to learn database design, I decided to build what would become the site that exists today.
At first a simple tool for users to add recommendations based on a pair of anime, the site gradually gained popularity over the years once people learned such a service existed, as until 2007 we were the only resource that offered anime recommendations. I’ve never advertised and instead, we grew based on word of mouth in the anime community. Since then, we’ve added the ability to add lists of what you’ve seen and read, the huge collection of anime you can legally watch online through partnerships with Crunchyroll, Hulu, etc, and lots more.
But going back a bit, my first interaction with the anime and manga industry was around 2004-2005, when a brand manager at the now defunct ADV got in touch to see if I’d be interested in getting screener copies of their DVDs and adding reviews on the site. Given I still had a ton of time on my hands I gratefully accepted, and added (our own now defunct) DVD review database. I stayed in touch with him when he moved to Funimation, and met him in person at Sakura Con in 2007 – the one year that Anime-Planet had a convention booth, and the year we added the site accounts so that people could keep track of their lists. I still remember a conversation I had with him about how excited I was about our site traffic: at the time, around 50,000 pageviews, which pales in comparison to the many millions we get now.
The next few years were fairly uneventful – Anime-Planet continued to grow organically through the various site features that kept getting added, and I didn’t have much contact with the industry… at least, not until a chain of events started that’s led to Anime-Planet’s presence as the only personal list and recommendation site with aggregated legal anime to watch online.
Without going too deep into details, I spent a few years working on Anime-Planet’s relationship with Crunchyroll, who we added as our first video partner in Feb of 2014. I’m still in touch with Crunchyroll to date and visit their office when I’m in San Francisco sporadically, have a CR column that showcases the recommendations people add on Anime-Planet (with a new, educational article series coming soon), and look forward to future opportunities we have to work together.
After Crunchyroll followed Hulu, who I was introduced to due to contacts within the DVD industry. We currently offer all anime content on Hulu to watch on Anime-Planet, which includes tens of thousands of episodes from Viz, Sentai Filmworks, Funimation, and many other companies. Meanwhile, we also formed a partnership with Viki, a company focused mostly on Korean dramas but that has a small selection of niche anime titles (mostly from Osamu Tezuka). I pursued Viki on my own without any industry contacts with the company, and visited their office in San Francisco to discuss the arrangement.
One thing I’ve found really interesting about the industry is their corporate offices. To date, I’ve visited the main office of both Crunchyroll and Viz in San Francisco (in Crunchyroll’s case, two different locations over the past 6-7 years), as well as Viki’s office. You might expect that visiting such a place would be stuffy and boring, but Crunchyroll and Viz were both adorned with tons of merchandise, products and other fun stuff that made you feel at home – as many who work at such companies are just anime and manga fans like yourself!
The past 15 years have been an interesting ride, having built a proof-of-concept I didn’t expect anyone to use that turned into a destination site for anime fans worldwide, reaching millions of users a month. To date, the site has always been run by just me and a handful of other volunteers, and I think my journey into the anime industry proves that you don’t have to have a college degree in marketing or a career path that’s entrenched in the industry to break into it. Sometimes, all it takes is a code editor and an idea to get involved with the artform you love.