MyAnimeList

• 1. Introduction

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  In 2015, MyAnimeList drew 120 million visitors in a single month. Every one of them came to a site run not by a company but by volunteers. As of January 2023, the database held over 23,000 anime and more than 62,000 manga entries. Its origins were a single person, a personal web project, and a naming idea borrowed from social media.

• 2. One Man's List

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  Garrett Gyssler launched the site in November 2004, calling it AnimeList. He ran it entirely on his own for the next four years. The change to MyAnimeList came from Myspace, then the dominant social network. Gyssler borrowed that platform's possessive "My" to fit his site into the era's fashion for personalized web spaces. He kept the site running until 2008, when it sold for the first time.

• 3. How Rankings Are Made

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  Fifty votes is the minimum a title needs before MyAnimeList will assign it an official ranking. Users score anime and manga on a scale from one to ten. Those scores feed into a formula the site runs twice a day. It weighs a title's average user score against the overall average score across the entire database. A further restriction removes votes from users who have not completed at least 20 percent of the title. In February 2020, the site revised its formula to prevent coordinated score manipulation, a practice the community called vote brigading.

• 4. A Series of Owners

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  On the 4th of August 2008, CraveOnline, a men's entertainment site owned by AtomicOnline, purchased MyAnimeList for an undisclosed sum. In 2015, DeNA bought the site from CraveOnline and announced a partnership with Anime Consortium Japan to stream anime through a service called Daisuki. Media Do acquired it in January 2019 and announced plans to focus on e-book sales and marketing. A 2021 funding round added Kodansha, Shueisha, Shogakukan, Akatsuki, The Anime Times Company, DMM.com, Kadokawa Corporation, Bushiroad, and Dentsu as investors. By April 2025, a Tokyo-based company called Gaudiy, which specializes in Web3 and AI technology, had acquired Media Do's ownership stake. On the 7th of May 2025, Gaudiy bought out the remaining shareholders and became MAL's sole owner.

• 5. Commerce and Streaming

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  In April 2016, MyAnimeList embedded episodes from Crunchyroll and Hulu directly onto its pages, putting over 20,000 episodes within the site itself. On the 8th of March 2018, it opened an online manga store with Kodansha Comics and Viz Media. Users could now buy digital manga without leaving the platform. The store launched in Canada before expanding to the United States, the United Kingdom, and other English-speaking countries. On the 25th of September 2019, Hidive partnered with MyAnimeList. The deal gave users a curated selection of embedded Hidive shows for free and incorporated MAL's ratings into Hidive's platform. In October 2021, MyAnimeList and parent company Media Do released a series of non-fungible token products based on the Fist of the North Star manga, under the name Manga Fragments: Dying Like a Man.

• 6. Crises and Censorship

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  In January 2017, MyAnimeList rewrote an anti-Nazi article a contributor had posted on the site, without notifying the author. The contributor, who was Jewish, criticized the site for softening the article's tone and adding what they described as a semi-heroic Nazi character. In May 2018, site staff took the platform offline for several days, citing security and privacy concerns. The effort to comply with the European Union's GDPR also forced MyAnimeList to disable its API. Third-party apps that relied on it became unusable. On the 10th of May 2023, a hacker replaced every anime title in the database with a reference to Serial Experiments Lain. The site came back online on the 13th of May, with personal user data confirmed intact. Any list updates, forum posts, or edits made in roughly 8.5 hours before the attack had to be redone. Since October 2025, MyAnimeList has been permanently blocked in Russia, where authorities classified its LGBTQ+ content as extremist.