A new report from YouTube reveals how the cratering of traditional U.S. studio animation and the aging of a digital-first audience may be expanding opportunities for independent digital animation.
The latest research from the company’s Culture and Trends team, “Animation’s New Wave,” highlights the artists, stories, styles, funding models, and international reach behind the current growth of animation on the platform. The findings came from interviews with creators, analyzing viewership data among 16 to 49-year-old users across the globe on the platform’s main app (not YouTube Kids), and thousands of responses from U.S.-based animation viewers ages 14 to 49 as part of a survey co-conducted with SmithGieger.
According to the report, interest in animation is global, with 50 percent of online animation fans 14 to 49 reporting that they watch animated series in languages other than their own. In the case of a Korean series like Alien Stage, 90 percent of the animated survival audition show’s viewership came from outside Korea. “So many of these big series are originating outside of the U.S.,” says Maddy Buxton, Culture & Trends Manager at YouTube. “Alien Stage started in Korea, and Glitch is based out of Australia. These are having massive breakthroughs here, as well as all of these other markets.”
Other key findings indicate that an oft-overlooked demographic within studio animation — teens and young adults — is consuming animation on the platform at a high rate. According to the survey, 66 percent of 14- to 24-year-old animation fans watch memes — a brief, often original character animation set to audio that can serve as a template for further adaptation — weekly or more, while 57 percent watch animatics — typically used in the pre-production process for generating a rough draft of an animated sequence — also weekly or more. When it comes to narrative episodic series distributed on YouTube, 63 percent of 14- to 24-year-old animation fans watch those weekly or more, while 60 percent agree they like watching animated series created by independent animators for YouTube as much or more than series created by a major studio.
“Things like Storytime Animation [animation or animatic stories from creators’ everyday lives] go back to YouTube’s earliest days, but I would say in terms of seeing narrative series breaking through, the real turning point for us was in 2024,” Buxton explains. “That’s when Glitch [Studios] put out The Amazing Digital Circus, and that landed on [eight out of 12 countries’] trending topics lists. We had never seen an animated series have that kind of exposure, especially so soon in its tenure. They had only released four episodes at the time.”
Series creators like Glitch (The Amazing Digital Circus, Murder Drones), Vivienne Medrano (Helluva Boss, Hazbin Hotel), and Ian SBF and Thobias Daneluz (Sociedade Da Virtude) are featured in the report, highlighting how a community of global creators and largely adult animated series have found success on the platform. A number of these creators have been producing for years (Sociedade Da Virtude launched in 2017), have racked up massive followings (Medrano’s Vivziepop has more than 11 million subscribers), with healthy viewership numbers (videos tagged with Alien Stage collectively earned 330 million views in 2025) regardless of what part of the world they hail from — be it Argentina, Japan or the U.K.
Several of these YouTube-first series have also found second homes with Hollywood streamers like Netflix, Prime Video, and Adult Swim/HBO Max Brazil. In the case of Glitch’s The Amazing Digital Circus, which was created by Gooseworx and released in October 2023, multiple licensing deals, including Hot Topic and Good Smile Company, an Annie nomination, and over 600 million lifetime views of its first four episodes led to a run on Netflix. Yet, despite that mainstream crossover, Buxton says creators’ relationships with their content on YouTube are not significantly changing. “For most of the animators that I spoke with, the way that they thought about it was that YouTube was their home base where they had really established their fan communities. Getting these other licensing deals was a great way to expand their audiences, but for most of them, the core was YouTube,” she explains.
Still, streaming deals indicate a pathway for production outside the studio pipeline amid the industry’s decreasing commitment to producing animation in-house — a result of outsourcing, AI, the death of dedicated kids’ brands in the streaming era, and fewer greenlights for adult animation, among other challenges. According to Buxton, the report’s featured creators are a mix of artists with studio backgrounds (like Knights of Guinevere’s Dana Terrace), looking for more freedom, and artists who were never in the studio system. And irrespective of where they cut their teeth, many develop cost-effective proofs of concept — animatics or whole pilots — and build a core audience to support more content creation with their titles.
The report puts a particular focus on the fan element, noting how these productions use their fan communities to bolster their brands. Many are financed through crowdfunding, with subscribers garnering exclusive perks, and embrace subtitles and alternate audio (a series like the Japanese cyberpunk Milky Subway is dubbed in 10 different languages). Both help them permeate globally among culturally distinct and multilingual communities and regions. Creators are also regularly engaging with fans via YouTube’s Community tab, Shorts, and, to a slightly lesser extent, live streams, which can operate as their own organic and fan-driven word-of-mouth marketing.
Without studio backing, productions face funding limitations, but as a result, they can embrace innovative artistic approaches and a production model that Buxton agrees can operate like a version of Hollywood’s own media ecosystem, down to pilot season. “We see some animation channels testing the waters first with animatics, seeing if there is audience interest before they invest more in it. And Glitch will release merch as soon as it releases a new episode. They don’t even wait to see how a series is going to perform,” Buxton explains. “The biggest differentiator is the fan participation element. These channels are from creators who have grown up online, typically. They really understand how fan dynamics work, and how to leverage that to make fans a part of the process of what they’re building from the beginning, which is quite different from the studio model.”
The “Animation’s New Wave” report also captures the less conventional, familiar, or finished work that is fueling the medium on YouTube. That includes virtual creators (or YouTubers who use a virtual avatar to entertain) like Japanese VTuber Juufuutei Raden and his 1 million subscribers. There’s also the animatics behind EPIC: The Musical, Jorge Rivera-Herrans’ adaptation of The Odyssey that turned fan art into official visuals for an original concept album, earning over 1.3 billion views in the process. Buxton points to Canadian musician BBNO$, who followed a similar model by commissioning artists for small animatic music videos, as evidence of a growing trend.
Despite being outside the bounds of many people’s traditional understanding of animation, 57 percent 14-to-24-year-old respondents reported watching animatics weekly or more, and 61 percent that have watched a virtual creator online agree it’s possible to feel just as connected to a virtual creator or artist as a real creator or artist.
“Some of it comes out of what we see in places like Korea and Japan, where some creators don’t want to show their face, and they’re more comfortable having some sort of an animated avatar. But VTubers are incredibly popular in the U.S., even as many people might not be familiar with them,” explains Buxton. “Ironmouse recently had the number one song on our Shorts charts. So these creators are definitely spreading, and a lot of it has to do with the fact that they inspire this fan participation-meets-creation element, a more open source participatory model.”
That’s particularly true for the memes, which ignite choreography and sound trends (OFF SCRIPT’s U.K. short featuring Lily Allen’s “Smile,” or DJ TAK’s vocaloid track “Lemon Melon Cookie” out of Japan), or spawn their own fan riffs and communities to the tune of 95 million views in just eight months like France’s LE Poisson Steve. “Memes are a language that anybody growing up with the internet is familiar with and used to and has probably taken part in in some way,” says the Culture & Trends manager. “It’s just a much easier entry point for fans because it offers this template for them to then use and create and become a part of this community.”
Buxton notes that while the report captures new and platform-specific trends, it points to both larger historical — see Rooster Teeth — and emerging animation trends. “Even 10 years ago, if you looked at Anime viewership on YouTube, the majority was coming from Japan. Now, the majority of the viewership of anime content on YouTube comes from outside Japan. So I think some of this audience interest is just the product of some of these animation trends from here and elsewhere becoming much more mainstream. Content has become much more global.”
