MyAnimeList, often abbreviated as MAL, is an anime and mangasocial networking and social cataloging application website. The site provides its users with a list-like system to organize and score anime and manga. It facilitates finding users who share similar tastes and provides a large database on anime and manga. In 2018, MyAnimeList reported having approximately 15,000 anime and 45,000 manga entries. In 2015, the site received 120 million visitors a month.
History
The site was launched in November 2004 by Garrett Gyssler and maintained solely by him until 2008. Originally the website was called AnimeList, but Garret 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 embed 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 API for third-party apps, rendering them unusable. The moves were done in efforts 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.
Features
MyAnimeList lists anime, aeni, and donghua. Similarly, MyAnimeList has information on manga, manwha, manhua, as well as dōjinshi and light novels. Users create lists that they strive to complete. Users can submit reviews, write recommendations, blogs, post in the site's forum, create clubs to unite with people of similar interests, and subscribe to the RSS news feed of anime and manga related news.The MyAnimeList community also organizes various events related to anime and manga, such as yearly watching/reading challenges and a fantasy sport spin on seasonal TV anime titles.
Scoring
MyAnimeList allows users to score the anime and manga on their list on a scale from 1 to 10. These scores are then aggregated to give each show in the database a rank from best to worst. A show's rank is calculated twice a day using the following formula: Where stands for the total number of user votes, for the average user score, for the minimum number of votes required to get a calculated score, and for the average score across the entire anime/manga database. Only scores where a user has completed at least 20% of the anime/manga are calculated. On February 12, 2020, MyAnimeList updated how the scoring system worked after several attempts were made to boost or lower the scores of anime and manga by making illegitimate accounts to rate the series. All scores on the website were recalculated, with illegitimate scores filtered out.
