Quick note: Google just had an announcement regarding their 2009 year-end zeitgeist. Coming in at #8 on the entertainment list: “anime online” — it’s known that Google at least occasionally uses the level of search queries for its own strategic planning, and YouTube recently announced automatic translation of captioned videos. Google has very good, although far from human, translation capabilities; this is just SPECULATION, but tossing anime onto Youtube with captions and letting big G handle “localizing” it into the languages of the world would be a cheap if imperfect way of getting a global audience for any show — the cost would consist of the wages of a single person to convert the script into the right format and clean it up a bit (maybe not even that with the right software in the future), far less than even a single human translator for a single language. This is something that other companies, like Hulu and Crunchyroll, cannot do as easily, so it might be something that will show up in time.
The Zeitgeist list is at http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/press/zeitgeist2009/index.html