Survey Conclusion: Scanlation and Its Impact (Part 1)
First, a fair warning, this is a loooong rant post(3500 words, geez. I cut it in two parts). READ AT YOUR OWN RISK. And when I say rant post, I do mean it. There’s not much structure and no overall point. You’re going to see me defend illegal scanlation and anime sites and then berate it. I am no expert on any of these subjects, and it’s just stuff that I wonder about. Also, if you want to read it in a wider non-tumblr format, it’s also here:Â
https://hoshiscans.wordpress.com/2018/10/22/scanlation-and-its-impact/#more-4250
 Second, I wanted to thank everyone who participated in the survey on Tumblr. The survey this time was more for me to gauge the current mindset of people in our community rather that to play with raw numbers and data like my last survey. I’d been doing some thinking and reading on current legal services and illegal services and thinking about the state of both of those. How easy would it be to switch over? Why is piracy so prominent? Would it be simple to turn the tide on that?
 Now, keep in mind that I have always had the mindset of a pirate. My moral compass in terms of pirating is almost non-existent. I’m a reserved buyer and I rarely buy anything that I don’t know I’d like. America itself is big on customer satisfaction and their return policies. I find it difficult to buy digital manga or movies where I cannot return if I don’t like it. However, I am subscribed to a few media services now. If this were me in my broke student years, I would have pirated everything, from movies to programs to music to manga. Now as a working adult, I do have a few accounts with legal sites, and that is simply because the service it offered really beat out the pirating options. And that got me thinking, at what point can legal services beat out illegal ones?
 Flaws in the Current Industry
First I’d like to say that I’m a big proponent of a market catered to the buyer. Industries grow and change and they must adapt to a changing landscape. We’ve seen this with the growth of the internet, as Youtube began replacing traditional media, you could stream music for free, news outlets and magazines went digital and you can now choose not to pay for news. And each time, it was met with outrage from then-operating industries who’ve been around before that. Proponents of cable TV were dissing Youtube and online media, they were stressing over the death of an entire industry. But you know what? In business, you adapt to survive and match consumer needs. We started seeing cable TV shows going digital. We see snippets of talk shows and news streaming over Youtube. Industries are always going to be supported by the consumers, and if consumer behaviors shift, those industries will also have to shift with it.
 Since we don’t have a good example for the manga industry as of yet, I’m gonna use the anime industry, which I believe may pave the way for the manga industry. The first thing I’ll want to do is take a look at the data that I’ve gathered. I don’t think the sample size is large enough or broad enough to make sound conclusions, so please take that into consideration when I make my assumptions. From what we show in the results, while, predictably, 72% of respondents chose illegal sites as their main source of anime, around 28% chose legal channels. And then when you look at manga, 83% chose illegal sites, and 17% chose legal.
But currently, I believe that both markets are not in a very good state yet. I strongly believe that to lessen the impact of a harmful agent on the market, you don’t try to beat it down. You try to find ways to lessen the incentive.  An example is other crimes. I’m not saying that you don’t penalize those who do the crime, but I’m saying that you should try to find the source and lessen the incentive. Yes, there are thieves who will steal no matter what you say. But there are also ones who steal to support their family, they steal out of desperation, they steal because they have no other options left. Like I believe that the government should implement programs to decrease incentives for stealing, I think businesses should do the same.
So in this age of internet and easily accessible pirated content, what can we do? While it hasn’t happened in manga (yet?), we have seen the struggles with piracy in the movie/dvd and music industry. It’s still prominent to this day, but I believe that it’s not as big of an impact on companies as it used to be. And that’s because those companies adapted. Netflix came into creation, who offered enough shows and a good enough service to make the audience think twice about pirating. Customers started thinking, was it really worth the guilt, the trouble to go onto a torrent site, risk potential virus infection, for a low to medium-quality version of a movie? OR, pay $8.00 a month, and be completely in the legal clear, access high-speed and high-quality videos, with NO shadiness? People started choosing the latter. Perhaps not in the beginning when the selection was small, but as it expands, more and more will begin choosing it. Sites like Netflix and Crunchyroll were lowering the incentives for people to pirate.
 While it’s a great move in the right direction, it’s not perfect. I have many complaints about this system. This is currently a very, monopolistic market. Netflix, Crunchyroll and, let’s throw Amazon into the mix, all have exclusive licenses to series. Which means, those series are not competing with anyone. The only way you choose which service to access is which series you want to watch. Not what the quality of the service is, or the price of the product. These companies know that they are the only provider of this product, and to be honest, I think it hinders their incentive to improve on their services. Much more money will be spent going into getting more exclusive licenses than actually improving their product. And then, for example, if you are a regular subscriber of Crunchyroll, but you suddenly have one show that you would like to watch that’s only carried on Netflix, you would then have to have a subscription to Netflix…for that one single show you want to watch. I won’t even imagine wanting to watch 3 different shows on three different platforms per season.
 And another thing that scares me is, I read an article on millennial purchasers. For piratable content, they are more likely to purchase a service solely to “support the creator”, not because they think the product is worth that amount of money. This is scary for me because it means a lot of people are disregarding the quality of the service. A legal streaming site could provide half-assed fansubs on a crappy video player, and people buy into that because it’s the only way to support the creator.
 I’m not saying that it’s good to pirate everything, but it’s definitely a callout to the current industry. The global anime industry is a very non-competitive market and that doesn’t sit well with me.
 Crunchyroll and the Successful Illegal Aggregator
Aside from the fact that it’s a non-competitive market, I’d say they’d been doing a decent job at nabbing a lot of anime titles so that our access to those titles has improved. I want to take a closer look at the case study of Crunchyroll, who I think had a very interesting beginning and I just wanted to share this little tidbit with you.
 42.5% of you voted that you would not support a company that was involved in illegal actions in the past. 23% of you are users of Crunchyroll, who would not support a company that was involved in illegal actions in the past. The fun tidbit is that Crunchyroll was involved in illegal actions in the past. And possibly much worse than what the current readers think of aggregator sites.
 Back in the day, Crunchyroll was an illegal aggregator. They hosted fansubs on their website without the permission of fansubbers. And instead of making money from ads like what current aggregators like Mangago or Kissmanga do, they installed a paygate, where they charge readers for higher quality versions of the content on their site. Fansubbers hated them. Publishing studios hated them. If you hated mangago for making money from ads using your scanlations, imagine what Crunchyroll was doing. They were having their users pay to watch fansubbed content uploaded by other users. But I highly believe that it’s because of the people paying for it and the money they were making, that investors saw an opportunity in Crunchyroll and then they landed that $4M investment, which allowed them to go out and try to secure actual licenses from studios, launching their current business venture. The fact that enough people were paying for illegal content (even when they could get it free from individual fansub sources), showed that there was a definite demand in the market that current companies weren’t fulfilling.
 Nowadays, I do see Crunchyroll as a great source for anime streaming and it feels like they’re the closest to a solution for the previous lack of anime for the English-speaking market. A lot of fansubs were there to fill a demand for anime content that was otherwise unavailable legally in the US. There were DVDs available, but were they as fast as fansubs? DVDs had to deal with physical manufacturing and some other issues. It could take a year or more for DVDs to be made of content that was being streamed in Japan. Crunchyroll was completely digital, cut down on those physical costs and timeframes and supplied the fanbase with a ton of content. It closed a bit of the gap that the American anime fans were feeling every time anime came out in Japan. And I’m talking about illegal Crunchyroll. But they built a fanbase, an investor saw that fanbase and that opportunity, and that demand, and bet on it. But if they weren’t a profiting aggregator to begin with, I wonder if this would have happened? Something similar is going on in scanlation, where there’s this huge demand for manga, but not enough being licensed because the costs of production are too high and it’s too much for licensors to invest in. Will something similar to what Crunchyroll has done, happen in scanlation? It’s already been proven that people are willing to pay for illegally translated series. There are dozens of patreons online for scanlation, and they each make between $30 - $1,000 a month. That’s money going to scanlators that could potentially go to artists if they had the means. But the true question is…will the amount people who are willing to pay for a digital version of a niche genre be enough to support this business model? If it were to happen, the best bet at the moment would be the aggregators. They have proven sales numbers from their ads, and data on traffic to their sites.
 Our current manga market is set up so that all licensed manga available is scattered around the web. The largest and probably most popular sites to read manga is Amazon/Comixology. They likely have the largest selection of manga that you will find. And even then, there are tons of licensed manga that you won’t find on there. Sites like Lezhin and Renta, which are big in the BL community, rarely host their manga on Kindle. Which means, you’ll have to visit multiple sources for all of your BL. Normally, it wouldn’t be too much effort. But in this day and age, when every ELSE you can get just on Amazon, it makes this seem very inconvenient. Especially if there’s another website where you can find nearly everything on. An aggregator.
 I’ve never really seen the aggregators as an enemy in this world of pirating. I know many scanlators who do though. But I’ve always seen them as a way for all this manga to reach others. They are the most convenient, and if this pirating community were run like a business, they’d be at the top. Not because they make money, but because they provide the best service. We see time and again, readers choosing to flock to mangago despite the complaints of their quality of uploads, because…convenience is the number one demand. There is a thriving community with a huuuuge selection of manga all in one place. I honestly believe that if there were a successor to Crunchyroll in the manga market, it would be an aggregator.
