Kaata Sakamoto, Vice President of Netflix’s Content Division, discussed the massive popularity of the Sakamoto Days anime in a roundtable last month. With 24.4 million views in the first half of 2025, he says that Sakamoto Days was Netflix’s “most-watched series in terms of views per half-year period” for an anime from Japan. Netflix defines views as the number of hours watched divided by the runtime.
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While this definition gives popular shorter titles the edge over popular longer titles (since it measures a viewing density, if you will), Sakamoto Days also fared very well in terms of pure hours watched. The Naruto franchise pulled 40 million hours watched to Sakamoto Days‘ 24 million, with Naruto having several hundred episodes to Sakamoto Days‘ eleven episodes (at the time of measurement). This is both a testament to Sakamoto Days‘ explosive popularity and Naruto‘s longevity, first debuting in 2002. Naruto‘s availability on Netflix also varies by region.
Netflix recently published its stats for the first half of 2025, breaking down TV series by seasons (broadly speaking), with Sakamoto Days Season 1 by far the most-watched anime season during this period. Demon Slayer Season 2 came second. Studio Ghibli’s library continues to garner significant views on the platform globally, with around 40 million views.
Sakamoto also discussed Netflix’s approaches of financing versus licensing anime, and exclusive distribution versus the multi-platform distribution model more common in Japan, which we also dove into at the link above. He says the company doesn’t have a specific policy regarding this, with the anime industry having “a distinctive and well-established ecosystem,” and adding, “How streaming services are involved is determined within the deal for each individual project.” Yuji Yamano, Netflix Director of Content, says that Netflix may purchase the distribution rights for older titles if they’ve been sold to other companies.
Yamano added that Netflix is receiving more inquiries from the planning stage (the earliest stage of anime creation) regarding global distribution. This may see more instances where Netflix streams an anime exclusively, or even finances the anime, giving it significant control of the anime’s creative process and marketing; Yamano recently shared in an interview with Nikkei XTrend that “we were able to work with TMS Entertainment [Sakamoto Days’ anime studio] from the very beginning of the animation project, which gave us plenty of time to understand the work and allowed us to develop it [the marketing] in a way that suited each country.“
In that same interview, Netflix VP Kim Minyoung indicated that Netflix was primarily focused on the U.S. and Japan when marketing Sakamoto Days, and stepped up marketing when real-time data showed popularity growth in territories like Indonesia. Netflix aims to use viewing data to inform marketing efforts more broadly.
As an aside, Justin Leach, the founder of Qubic Pictures, which produced the Leviathan anime for Netflix (animation production by Orange), discussed the challenges of how Netflix promoted the series internationally. As Netflix owned the copyright and thus control of the series’ marketing, Leach said:
“Marketing for Leviathan was limited in Japan, and there was no significant marketing in important overseas markets such as North America and Europe.
As it is a Netflix original series, it’s only natural that Qubic wasn’t in a position to manage overseas marketing. If Netflix had been able to take a comprehensive view and strategically develop comprehensive marketing strategies for the appropriate regions, I believe it could have been a driving force behind global success.
On the other hand, if a title falls outside of Netflix’s core selection in a region, I believe the production studio should have the option to market it independently, just as licensed production committee projects often promote themselves to maximize their success.“
You can read the roundtable here (via AV Watch), with Yamano and Sakamoto discussing anime localization, which can take as long as four months, anime viewership trends, and more.
Featured image ©Yuto Suzuki/SHUEISHA, SAKAMOTO DAYS PROJECT
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