Are we fucking the anime industry?

More specifically, does pirating anime cause significant losses to the anime industry?
I just read this article
goboiano.com/list/4104-how-much-money-you-cost-the-anime-industry-when-you-illegally-stream
and was thinking about it. The person who wrote it came up with a rough estimate of big money loss to the anime industry due to illegal anime streaming. She based her estimate on the number of views on some streaming site, but the first thing that come to my mind is that the number of viewers who would pay for anime if illegal free anime weren't available would be considerable smaller.
Also, I've heard that what really moves the anime industry are bluray sales, so streaming and downloading anime don't have a huge impact. Besides, japanese people have free access to anime on tv, so is it really wrong if they decide to record and upload anime? I mean, why there are televisons able to record programs if people aren't allowed to record what they watch?

So, what do you think, Sup Forums? Are we parasites fucking up anime?

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id fuck her industry if you nah mean homie

I hope they shutdown all stream site.

Well, kind of but the specific article you reference uses some super fucked up numbers.

Go buy some BDs or figures if it makes you feel so bad, that's practically how the industry gets funded nowadays.

The producers don't get a set amount of money for every view. Legal streaming sites just buy the streaming rights or something similar. More views just benefits Crunchy or Funi

Except that anime licensing is done with a flat fee, so that article is absolute dogshit.

>She
And into the trash it goes.

I don't care, to be quite honest.

Yes. If tomorrow no one could pirate anime, the amount of money the industry makes would at least triple. Anime is already popular everywhere, but no one is paying for it. The sudden feasibility of selling worldwide would also result in more advertisement, which would result in the medium becoming even more mainstream.

If I couldn't pirate anime I'd just not watch it.

No. Most of their money is made from merch and promoting the source material. I spend thousands on merch, manga and LNs each year.

Go be stupid somewhere else.

Anime is so hilariously shit right now that if I couldn't pirate it, there would be zero reason to watch it.

Yeah, the amount of anime watched on average would decrease, but the amount of anime pirated is huge. Even a small fraction of it is a lot of money.

You can't possibly believe that people would just stop watching anime in such proportion that there wouldn't be a market for it.

>streaming

We're not, we don't influence the industry regardless of how we consume their content.
You could argue that the japs who pirate anime are though.

I started actually downloading it back in HS. I used to stream but hated the low quality and adware from the sites. I have bought 2 Lain Blu-Rays and a Umaru Fig and pillow (yes Im fucking pleb, get over it), so you could say I have supported the industry to a certain extent. The problem is how fucking expensive it is to even buy blu-rays. Finally with sites like Amazon we can get lower priced bundles but its still a long shot. I remember looking at some blu-rays a few years ago and it was like $50 for 6 fucking episodes, fuck that noise. If the nips were willing to let you download the entire series in blu-ray quality for maybe lets say $5-10 they would at least double their world wide market. Maybe if the fucking Japs would put out half as many shows each season that were actually GOOD, this wouldn't be a problem. I know I am buying Gundam Unicorn Blu-rays, but not for fucking $100 you fucking kikenips.

I buy BDs/CDs/figures/keyrings etc. but I wouldn't if I had to pay to watch the shows first. i would just stop watching and buying.

No. Especially after the Great Recession and the slow economic growth in the global economy, people just don't really have the money to buy expensive things that have no other use than collecting dust.
There's a reason why Crunchyroll now has almost 21 million (750k paid, 20 million free advertisement) people streaming: most people are too poor to spend more than 10 USD for anime a month.

Read above. There isn't enough people rich enough to buy anime anymore. In the past 25 years, real income for everyone in the bottom 99.99 percent has stagnated badly.

Implying nips give a shit about overseas sales

>There isn't enough people rich enough to buy anime anymore. In the past 25 years, real income for everyone in the bottom 99.99 percent has stagnated badly.

I'm going to need a source for that. As far as I can tell the middle class is growing in most of the world and people are wasting money left and right.

>done with a flat fee
>See the enormous amounts of money American companies pay to license literally shit series
It's like they hired some of the dumbest people to be their CEOs.

Don't they? Why they let crunchy and funi stream their anime then? Serious question.

Most of the world equals developing nations that have devalued currency, huh? Because Western nations have been losing their middle class since the 1990s.
Fucking, WTO.

A flat fee doesn't invalidate the article because the fee is a function of how much the license is worth. If anime could be sold for a lot of money, the fee could cost a lot of money.

Then... we would be free?

“If you watch just Naruto, your subscription money goes toward supporting that show. If you watch more than one show, the money is split proportionately among those shows depending on which ones you watch the most,” said [Crunchyroll CEO] Gao.

sounds more like it's licensing fee + stream fees

Yes, pirated anime costs the industry a lot of money. People are lying when they say they wouldn't buy anything.

Overall, the number of anime seen by people would be lower, and there would be more rewatching. But the total number of bought anime would be much bigger, even if every piracy doesn't mean one lost sale. Piracy removes the demand for buying anime.

Also, the threat from piracy also forces the legal options to be artificially cheap. Compare prices in the 90s to modern prices. People in the 90s still bought anime, even though it was about 50 times as expensive as today.
Some people would drop anime, but it is popular, and there is a big market for it, that many would buy if they had to, just like they did in the 90s.

>If anime could be sold for a lot of money, the fee could cost a lot of money.

Don't kid yourself. If a little money was enough to stop your anime addiction you could stop now if you tried.

Japan could not care less about how anime does overseas

They'd care if overseas actually bought the anime instead of just pirating

They don't care or WANT western interest and good on them.

I can't fucking stand people that insist on talking about things that they have absolutely no fucking idea about.

Impressive the mental gymnastics people do to justify piracy.

Most of their shitty anime are made for the otaku who spend ridiculous amounts of money to collect everything. Any outside interest is just a bonus.

Betch, even in Japan they make most of their money from BD sales.

They couldn't give less of a fuck about the literal cents they make from people payong for CR membership

Not him but you can find these information in any site about economics. Like, there is even a whole book about it (the capital in the 21th century IIRC).

Fuck of dirty gaijin
>implying you matter in the slightest

If it weren't for piracy they'd make a lot more. Piracy forces the prices of Crunchyroll to be artificially low, and the threat of your favourite series being removed from Crunchyroll would drive more people to buy it, if they couldn't just pirate when they wanted to rewatch.

>does literally stealing affect the income of people?
What the fuck kind of question is that?

>literally stealing

The reason they only make 'literal cents' from CR is piracy, which is exactly what we're discussing. Holy shit are you people mentally disabled?

>Look at me pull numbers out of my ass

How do you know that? The nips publicize the amount of money they earn which each medium? Could you provide some source?

I don't see it. Developing nations are getting richer and from our perspective developed nations are still filthy rich regardless of any supposed 'stagnation'. This is pretty evident just by walking around in them. I won't be convinced unless someone post some real statistics of purchasing power around the world.

I would pay for streams if I could afford it, and more importantly if legal options were available. As it stands CR's available library in my country is rather crap.

Let's say CR membership is 5 bucks a month, with the current 750,000 paid members, that amounts to 3.75 million a month in dues.
Now, take into account that the CR CEO said that the 20 million free members (watches CR but has to suffer from ads) also almost equals the amount paid members give, let's say 3 million a month.

That's 6.75 million USD a month. That's 81 million USD worth of revenues in a single year.

Japanese companies/publishers are major investors in CR for this very reason.

Crunchyroll would not be making the money it's making if piracy didn't exist.
Also
>buying DVDs and BDs when those things will become obsolete when the next great video player is released.
Congratulations on buying vinyl records.

Type Crunchyroll 750,000. There are news articles on this from 2015.

The only problem are the stream sites that profit from ads and premium membership bullshit they feed to clueless people. Otherwise, Japan hasn't made significant pushes to market their product overseas outside of Crunchyroll and Funimation.

>even in Japan they make most of their money from BD sales.
This is factually incorrect. Something like 17% of their money comes from BDs, whereas 40%+ comes from merch. Stop spewing bullshit.

I don't give a fuck. Im just gonna torrent till the end of time.

No, the reason they make cents from crunchyroll is because most of the money you pay for membership stays within crunchy, hell even if a single studio got 50% of your memmbership it would take more than 100 CR subscriptions to make them as much money as a single BD boxset

As other people have said, if I stopped being able to pirate anime I just wouldn't watch it. Sometimes I like a series enough to consider buying BDs just to support the franchise, but frankly the prices are so ridiculous there's no point, especially when realistically they're going to be nothing more than collector's items that I'm not going to watch. If I see nice merch I buy it, but I rarely see nice stuff for series I'm interested in since I'm not into figs. I'm pretty sure most people who pirate anime are the same, honestly.

>Developing nations are getting richer
2 dollars in a daily wage is getting richer but it won't buy them fucking blurays that could feed them for a month.

>Crunchyroll would not be making the money it's making if piracy didn't exist.

What? That doesn't make sense. If you're trying to make a point of the fact that CR started out as a piracy site, that's retarded and I hope I don't need to explain why.

Isn't it kind of Crunchyroll's fault for entering the market with a service of less quality than fansubs?

I like how there's always idiots on Sup Forums that think their opinion is factual, with absolutely zero evidence to back it up. There isn't a single person here that knows what people in the industry think of piracy.
The ONLY thing that we can assume from the inaction of animation studios is that piracy either does not affect them, or that it does not affect them significantly enough to do anything about it.

THe plural of Revenue is revenue

>2 dollars in a daily wage is getting richer but it won't buy them fucking blurays that could feed them for a month.

Except that's not the reality of developing nations.

Or that doing something about it is really hard, which it is.

Buying pirated DVDs and BDs in marketplaces in developing nations =/= supporting companies in Japan.

I assume you have evidence to back up that claim.

Are you fucking serious? You don't believe fighting piracy is difficult?

So no, you don't have any kind of source whatsoever.

You're pretty retarded if you think one conglomerate can eliminate the hundreds of thousands of uploaders and downloaders with ease and without law enforcement help

Don't put words in my mouth.

Haha, you got me user. Congratulations on winning the argument.

Thank you. In the future, don't talk about matters that you aren't educated on.

Anime is not the primary source of income in the industry. Also, they make jackshit from overseas streaming and a lot of shows don't get proper DVD/BD releases and the ones that do are priced a fuckload more than any western would be willing to spend. People don't want purposefully sabotaged BDs to discourage reverse importing, nor do they want to shell out $80 USD for a movie. If they were betting their chips on western sales, then the industry would be fucked 12 ways to Sunday.

The legal anime industry is trash in the west, it's all split between several subscription services that might not even pick up a show or even have some in your region.

Pirating and buying merchandise is the best way to watch anime in my humble opinion.

you forgot the link

youtube.com/watch?v=3NuFVQk_CCs

dunno.

>Also, I've heard that what really moves the anime industry are bluray sales
Ya got trolled very hard by the entirety of the internet.

I've spent about $900 combined on dvds, manga, and merch for shows I would never bother watching if I even knew they existed if it weren't for pirating, so, I dunno dude.

>pirating = lost sales.

Gets me every time.

B-but my 5 dollars CR subscription surely keeps the industry afloat!

Anime is just a very niche form of entertainment exclusive to Japan, the companies that produce it get most of their revenue from advertising and merchandise and (save for a few exceptions) are ultimately just a part of a much bigger editorial business that drives most of their profits.
So no, illegally downloading anime doesn't "hurt" them in any way because these companies have developed a very particular business model that works for them in Japan and Japan only.
Foreign streaming companies are just cashing in a few pennies on a small audience without direct impact on the Japanese companies, the "what if" revenue is bullshit put out by big corporations to justify their aggressive anti-piracy policies, but realistically speaking are actually never taken into consideration by any serious economist to tell how well or bad a business is doing.

The only thing that's floating are the cadavers that encode for them.

Imagine a world without piracy, we could have a service like this:
-stream site
-you pay $5 to watch one episode, you get three days to finish it
-when you finish the entire season you get the offer to buy permanent access for an additional $80
-the first episode could maybe be free to lure people in

This would be so profitable, and people would love it, but it's not possible because of piracy. Piracy takes away great opportunities too, it does not only reduce the value of current business models.

No one is making that argument.

>west cuckolds
>relevant

>idiots that dont buy anime, ever
>relevant

>the west streaming and downloading shit
>relevant

My sides

>you get three days to finish it
People wouldn't like that at all. I think the music industry pre-iTunes tried something like that (time-limited subscriptions) and everyone hated it. For that to work, the rental period should be longer, maybe a month or so. Also, $5 for a single episode sounds too much, maybe $2.5 or so would be more economic.

>-when you finish the entire season you get the offer to buy permanent access for an additional $80
>$80
>eighty fucking American dollarydoos for digital access
Practically nobody would pay for that, even if piracy wasn't an option.

Actually sell to the west at a reasonable price if you want my money. Fuck paying the absurd prices you sell for domestically.

Guys does china pirating seinfeld instead of buying the $100 dollar BDs hurt our american television industry or propagate our shit culture for free?

>paying hundreds of dollars to watch one show
Are you on drugs?

We both know you wouldn't pay shit no matter how cheap as long as you can pirate for free.

You wouldn't download a car.

Less shows per season wouldn't be a bad thing tb͏h

If you were in japana yes but since you are not you are not important for them, hell they don't even take us in consideration for anything.

What's the sales model that's going to save anime?

>the amount of money the industry makes would at least triple
keep dreaming

Without piracy, would tend of thousands of weeablords come to Japan/akiba every year to drop their money? Akiba is probably at least 40% gaijin on any given day.

Piracy is hardly only negative.

Literally one intelligent Japanese person who realizes the enormous untapped western market.

>paying 60 lollars to stream a single-cour show
>can't even rewatch an ep after 3 days
>have to pay another 80 bucks to rewatch

If anime were a bigger source of income it could have a greater artistic value. Piracy hurts the art too.
When the industry is forced to make every anime into a toy commercial, it greatly reduces the artistic options for the creators. If people bought quality anime, the industry could try to make quality anime, without ruining the artistic integrity by being forced to add commercials to it.

Imagine you are the creator with the idea for Princess Tutu. However, to get it made, you have to do some edits:
- at least 5 female main characters
- 1 idol episode
- 3 j-pop insert songs
- no romance of any kind

You could see it hurt the artistic integrity of the show? If the anime weren't so dependent on selling extra stuff, if the anime could be profitable just on artistic merits, maybe you'd get to make the Princess Tutu true to your artistic vision

>Akiba is probably at least 40% gaijin on any given day
That's not true, unless you're counting non-white foreigners.

We've been over this already. Read the thread.

Piracy in the west is a problem that the western licensee must deal with as per the contracts with the licensors from Japan.

Of course, everyone knows that it's impossible to really combat piracy, but the token effort is important.

The western streaming services make some of their money by streaming, and some other part by selling localized anime discs.

Why wouldn't you? They're gaijin as well.