I know I’m preaching to the choir but the way they count losses is fucking ridiculous.
Japanese publishers’ idea of fighting against manga piracy: kill all legal options and launch their own website that is only available in USA (kmanga).
Gee, I wonder why that didn’t work!
For real, I’d pay for anime, manga, hentai, manhwan, western comics, etc. if there was just one site or a group of sites that:
- required just one account and/or one subscription for all of them
- was available worldwide with no restrictions
- was fast
- let me pay in any currency
- translated everything in different languages
Fuck yeah I’d pay for that. Sign me the fuck up for that awesome legal option.
Instead we have whatever the fuck is going on right now. Fan-subs and fan-translations are mandatory because their shit isn’t translated either ever or not in time. I want to give you my money for what I want and so that you make more awesome shit, but you fucking won’t let me.
The ships have to sail 🤷
Crucially: let me have the damn files.
Why would I pay to use your awful webreader or streaming client when reader apps with good UI and quality video players exist.
I’m not paying for shit lol
You forgot to mention the absolutely idiotic way kmanga works.
I’d mention that if they allowed me to even access the front page from my country. :)
They had some sort of point-based scheme, nuf said. It was so monumentally stupid I can’t even describe it without getting upset.
They do it to get you to buy points because they seem incapable of understanding any monetization strategy besides paying-per-chapter
Also have a crappy pricing scheme that people have been pushing against for years, while Shonen Jump rakes in money by having their app and monetization not suck
I’m not convinced any legal anime site can actually offer anything better than what I can get for free. Service issue.
Sorry Japan, manga piracy/scanlations until I die. There are so many niche authors/manga that never get officially translated to any other language because your industry thinks everyone just wants to read shounen and only the top 1% of shoujo/seinen/josei. Don’t even get me started on BL/GL.
Meanwhile some fucking random scanlation team does a better job of translating and making a chapter of Rose of Versailles more accessible to modern audiences than the entire Japanese manga publishing apparatus ever will.
Personally, I have a subscription to Shonen Jump’s app and love it, while kmanga insists on trying to get you to buy individual chapters, which I refuse to do.
Piracy is a service problem
Shounen Jump is a great example. It works, it’s readers find value in it enough to pay for subscriptions, and it clearly has some sort of profitability. A great model of what other manga magazines could do, but they refuse because most of them are run by dinosaurs and would rather cry “piracy is ruining our profits wah” when they DON’T EVEN HAVE A PRODUCT in the market to profit from!
SAME
“losses”
I tried to read the attack on titan manga years ago. I bought a manga at Barnes and noble and thought it was a decent price. But then I read the entire book in like 20 minutes and thought to myself that I way over spent on the book.
I regretted that purchase. Maybe it’s worth while if you want to look at the art for a long time, but I just wanted the story.
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… new pirate sites appeared. Cost to the industry: $800m per month.
oh, because they’re hosting those illegal sites? /s
