The story
The site was launched in November 2004 by Garrett Gyssler and maintained solely by him until 2008. Originally, the website was called AnimeList, but Gyssler decided to incorporate the possessive "My" at the beginning, following the fashion of the most important social network in those years: Myspace.
On August 4, 2008, CraveOnline, a men's entertainment and lifestyle site owned by AtomicOnline, purchased MyAnimeList for an undisclosed sum of money. In 2015, DeNA announced that it had purchased MyAnimeList from CraveOnline, and that they would partner with Anime Consortium Japan to stream anime on the service, via Daisuki.
MyAnimeList announced in April 2016 that they had embedded episodes from Crunchyroll and Hulu directly onto the site, with over 20,000 episodes being made available on the site.
On March 8, 2018, MyAnimeList opened an online manga store, in partnership with Kodansha Comics and Viz Media, allowing users to purchase manga digitally from the website. The service originally launched in Canada but later expanded to United States, the United Kingdom, and several other English-speaking countries.
MAL became inaccessible for several days in May and June 2018 when site staff took it offline for maintenance, citing security and privacy concerns. The site operators also disabled the API for third-party apps, rendering them unusable. The moves were done in an effort to conform to the European Union's GDPR program.
MyAnimeList was acquired by Media Do in January 2019; with their purchase, they announced their intention to focus on marketing and e-book sales to strengthen the site.
On September 25, 2019, Hidive and MyAnimeList announced a partnership which would incorporate MyAnimeList's content ratings into Hidive's streaming platform, while exclusively providing MyAnimeList users with a curated selection of embedded Hidive content for free.
On February 18, 2021, MyAnimeList announced it had conducted a third-party allotment of ¥1,200 million, with Kodansha, Shueisha, and Shogakukan, and parent company Media Do collectively investing ¥600 million. On May 31, 2021, it was revealed that Akatsuki, The Anime Times Company, DMM.com, and Kadokawa Corporation had invested ¥311 million during its initial third-party allotment. On July 26, 2021, it was revealed that Bushiroad, Dentsu, and other companies had invested ¥448 million, with the total third-party allotment raising to ¥1,360 million.
Read the full text
In October 2021, MyAnimeList collaborated with e-book publisher and parent company Media Do to release Fist of the North Star Manga Fragments: Dying Like a Man, a series of non-fungible token (NFT) products based on the Fist of the North Star manga.
On May 10, 2023, MyAnimeList went under an emergency maintenance after being hacked with the titles of all anime being replaced with a reference to Serial Experiments Lain. On May 13, the website resumed online activity after restoring its databases. Personal information and data of users was not breached during the hack, however any list updates, forum posts, edits, etc. made ~8.5 hours before the incident would have to be remade.
In April 2025, Gaudiy, a Tokyo-based company that specializes in Web3 and AI technology, acquired Media Do's ownership stake in MAL. On May 7, 2025, Gaudiy proceeded to buy out the remaining shareholders and in turn has become the sole owner of MAL.
From Wikipedia’s article on MyAnimeList, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4