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An article on HiAnime's death and anime piracy in general, from a former industry insider
(animebythenumbers.substack.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2026
18 points (90.9% liked)
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[X] Doubt
A lot of this just reads like Crunchyroll propaganda tbh. I'm sure almost every single pirate goes to another pirate site, at most using the very poor legal alternatives as a stopgap.
This is only true if the legal services actually offer good value and have the content the user is looking for.
Most of the time, pirates are too poor to afford legal routes. Sometimes, pirates are new to a hobby and checking out if they want to spend money, who usually switch to legal routes if they like it. Very rarely you get pirates who do it for the love of the game and were never going to pay to begin with.
And then, there is the rarest of all: an actual, countable lost sale for the business. All the previous methods are not lost sales. A business should not be legally allowed to count them because they werent going to get money from those scenarios. But the rarest instance of all is a person that was going to pay legally, and could definitely afford to, but decided to not pay and pirate instead.
Yeah that whole thing was a terrible read. The hydra grew back more heads back in the day and it will continue to do so this time.
He used to work for Crunchyroll. I've no doubt he's seen it happen firsthand.
He probably has, back in the days when Crunchyroll was worth its price. It's 2026, though. There are many reasons we stopped using it.
We're outliers though. Less than 10% of anime viewers are gonna have opinions on how Crunchyroll is managed. They just watch whatever the latest hype thing is.
Less than 10% of anime viewers have an opinion on ever-encroaching ads, limited selection and AI subs? Are you sure about that? We're anime nerds. We have a LOT of opinions.
That's the thing, most anime viewers aren't anime nerds. They just watch Solo Leveling or Frieren or whatever the latest, most hype things is and call it a day. That's why a show whose main character barely has a personality took "Best Character" in the Crunchyroll Awards last year, even against what should've been stiff competition. A significant number of viewers didn't watch any of the shows with good characters. Just Solo Leveling and maybe some isekai slop.
Anecdotally, none of the people I know IRL care about any of this stuff apart from my wife.
https://xkcd.com/2501/
If they aren't an anime nerd, would they be using an anime piracy site?
Yes. They'll google something like "watch solo leveling free" and then click on whatever links show up. It's not exactly advanced.
If they're just watching a single show would they really pay for a service? Can't speak for where you live but I'm fairly certain that where I live no one would do that.
It depends. Netflix makes the math a little weird there since there are definitely people watching just one or two anime on Netflix, but then also using it to watch live-action stuff.
Ah yea, I think Netflix would be a lot more different when making this decision compared to Crunchyroll.