A corollary to this is that resources are eventually going to get diverted to produce the kinds of things which appeal to hyperconsuming outliers who actually spend money on anime rather than e.g. a broader demographic which prefers to steal their anime. That is a large portion of the reason why the Akihabara crowd gets what they want in Japan -- they actually plunk down $X00 for a boxed set of Young Geek Improbably Surrounded By Beautiful Women Who Suffer Wardrobe Malfunctions Around Him with some degree of regularity, though that market appears to be drying up in recent years. (For obvious reasons I don't follow it, I just hear things on the IP grapevine.)

More mainstream audiences can't get things done for them without e.g. a cross-subsidy from Nintendo who can afford to treat the anime as a loss leader for the video game or collectible tie-in.

This is a shame for folks who care about distributional access, by the way. For example, there exist people who think that shoujo manga is a Good Thing (TM) for the U.S. comic books industry because it provides young girls with stories they can relate to and helps counteract the insanely rampant hypersexualization and misogyny of the US comic industry. Unfortunately, shoujo manga has fairly few crossover hits and hasn't had a commercialization success in the US comparable to e.g. Disney's line of princess products, which means that the industry is largely a) not willing to devote marketing muscle to promoting it as much as Bleach / Naruto / Pokemon / etc and b) some would argue that the old guard justify their marginalization of the genre and its fans by saying that (because of their marginalization!) it failed to sell well.

n.b. I'm neither a fan of shoujo manga nor a great lover of women's studies but someone who was both had veto power on my degree, so you can bet I at least listened for the more credible claims.