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From what I see, the anime industry is now a bubble for reasons down the timeline here:
The trend in mainstream anime steers towards novel and manga adaptations, as opposed to original series. This capitalizes on the nearly equal popularity in those formats, so people who wouldn't touch a novel but would watch an anime and vice versa will pay. However, loss of originality is a huge problem, because said novels and manga have limited creativity on their own. Now that the anime industry is using that creativity instead of their own, it becomes a formula and leads to a crapton of bad series.
Next, fansubbed anime becomes widespread due to the Internet. On the surface, this isn't a massive decline, because these fansubs are reaching audiences that can't buy them anyway, so it's really no financial loss for a massive chunk of the downloads. In fact, these audiences may actually seek to buy other more tangible merchandise, such as figurines.
Now I go back to the mainstream trend above - now the world is convinced that anime is a formula through fansubs, and therefore the audience is reduced to the same tight niche as before the Internet even came along (or it just doesn't grow compared to other formats through the internet).
After that, the anime industry craps their pants at the massive "loss of profit" and tries to mainstream their shows when they ship out for export. Mainstream targeting niche audiences. This isn't going to work. That's where the massive decline comes from - they're making already formulaic shows mainstream.
In conclusion: Your fans freaking love you and will throw all their disposable income on you as long as you continue to make original cool shit that only they like and nobody else would.
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