Answerman

The Return of Answerman (And Why Companies Bother to Take Down Piracy Websites)

Hello! I'm Jerome, and I'm honored to be your new Answerman correspondent.

I started my anime career 20 years ago with Manga Entertainment, one of the OG anime labels operating in the West. I've distributed thousands of hours of anime and even had a hand in making a couple, too. I know the business of anime well, and I'm looking forward to providing you with deep insights and pithy replies to some of your questions. Let's get down to it…

In the news:

If piracy websites pop up as quickly as they're shut down, why should licensing companies even bother?

Why indeed? As a couple of the excellent posters on the comments section of the related ANN article have noted, these piracy sites have a nasty habit of popping up again under slightly different domain names. The pirates are always one step ahead of the rights holders and law enforcement.

I can't be arsed debating the pros and cons of piracy. Digital piracy has completely disrupted the traditional anime and manga rights management and licensing industry. It's been a thing for the past 15 years. The world's leading anime SVOD platform started as a piracy site. They are now part of a virtual monopoly as far as anime simulcast and library ownership are concerned. The pirates won, in my opinion, and they continue to thrive because they often give fans what they want, when and where they want it, and how they want it.

So! Why does “The Industry” continue to fight digital piracy? One of the reasons could be that “The Industry” now provides its own VOD solutions that are often better than the service pirates offer. On top of that, they offer fans what they claim to want; immediate access and simulcasts up the wazoo, and all the freaking anime, all the freaking time.

In a world where anime fandom has become synonymous with a quantity over quality approach to appreciation and where “What's next?” is a more important question than “Why is it good?” It should come as no surprise that legit streamers now want to disrupt the disrupters, especially those without a license. But! Is it working?

According to FastCompany, “The number of visits to online piracy websites reached 141 billion in 2023, accounting for an estimated 386 million visits every single day. That number marks a 12% increase since 2019, according to MUSO.” MUSO is a U.K.-based anti-piracy analyst.

The report cites various reasons analysts believe uptake of piracy is increasing in key markets, “including cracking down on password sharing, introducing more adverts, and generally limiting the number of devices able to simultaneously watch shows, while also hiking prices.”

I've been in the anime distribution game long enough to see what happens when a massive anime piracy site is taken down and how it impacts a legitimate anime streaming service. There is a positive spike in new subscribers to the legitimate SVOD alternatives. Generally speaking, when it comes to anime service subscribers, there is a favorably high subscriber retention rate, in part thanks to the huge number of new series released every quarter. In addition, what this very useful report also observes is that anime piracy accounts for over a quarter of all online film and television content piracy and that spikes in the use of anime piracy sites are in regions and territories where access to legal alternatives is limited. Countries like India for example, so it should come as no surprise to see Crunchyroll making huge strides in that market over the past two years.

Perhaps the answer is that as long as there are an attractive number of new subscriber prospects out there using piracy services, legit streamers and distributors will continue to target those sites for removal because it will lead to new subscriber gains. Perhaps the cost-to-benefit ratio of these exercises delivers a meaningful ARPU (“Average Return Per User”).

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