One thing we’ve noticed since our anime popularity study is that there’s a large debate about the popularity of Naruto and One Piece compared to each other.
As two of the largest manga series, with both boasting devout followings, it’s easy to understand why many would be looking to weigh up Naruto vs One Piece to decide which one is best.
Well, we’re not here to provide subjective opinions about which is best in this article.
However, what we are going to do is look at which anime is more popular out of One Piece and Naruto in 2022, according to Google search data. If more people are searching for something, it’s fair to say it’s more popular.
So, is Naruto more popular than One Piece in 2022? Let’s start by looking at a worldwide popularity map.
Worldwide Popularity
Things look fairly even when glancing at the worldwide map, which shows the search popularity of Naruto vs One Piece over the last 90 days from the date this article was first published.
Ignoring the grey areas, which are regions without enough data on the Naruto and One Piece search terms to have statistical significance, we are left with 55 countries.
The larger countries are easy to see. The United States, the majority of South America, and Russia all prefer Naruto (blue). Canada, Australia and large parts of Europe prefer One Piece (red).
But of the 55 countries, which anime is more popular overall?
Well, in 36 of the countries in our dataset, One Piece is more popular.
Those countries are Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Greece, Italy, Hong Kong, Singapore, Morocco, Spain, France, Vietnam, Australia, Israel, Algeria, United Arab Emirates, Belgium, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Sweden, Austria, Germany, Iraq, Portugal, Turkey, Switzerland, Netherlands, Philippines, Canada, United Kingdom, Norway, Chile, Egypt and Nepal. Ordered from first to last in terms of One Piece popularity, i.e. Japan massively prefers One Piece (92%) whereas the difference is very small (52%) in Nepal.
That leaves 19 countries in our dataset where Naruto is more popular than One Piece.
Those countries are Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Argentina, Poland, Hungary, South Africa, Colombia, Romania, Ecuador, India, Bangladesh, Mexico, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Peru, Bulgaria and United Stats. Ordered from first to last in terms of Naruto popularity, i.e. Russia massively prefers Naruto (92%) whereas those in the United States only slightly prefer Naruto vs One Piece (51%).
But looking at individual countries is only one way of analyzing things.
What happens when we look at the worldwide popularity as a whole?
Which is More Popular in 2022?
As we can see from the image above, One Piece is more popular than Naruto when it comes to worldwide search demand over the last 90 days from the date this article was first published (6th July 2022).
This means that total global search popularity is higher for One Piece, as well as being higher in more individual countries. This isn’t necessarily a guarantee – a very large country could easily skew the worldwide data, but in this case it doesn’t.
We’ve now established that One Piece is currently more popular than Naruto.
But how does the One Piece vs Naruto popularity look when comparing it over a larger period of time?
5-Year Data
The data shows something really interesting when we look at One Piece vs Naruto over a 5-year period from the date this article was published.
Each game has spikes in popularity. It seems that Naruto enjoyed an extremely popular run during worldwide lockdowns, but overall – and more recently especially – One Piece seems to have the edge.
Despite this spikes, which is more popular out of Naruto or One Piece on average? Well, it turns out they have exactly the same average search popularity score – it’s a tie!
Conclusion
In summary, when trying to look at which anime is more popular between Naruto and One Piece, the answer is “it depends”.
If we look at recent data, One Piece is more popular than Naruto.
But if we look at long-term data from the last 5 years, One Piece vs Naruto popularity is completely even.
