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whenever the top pirate site goes down, a decent chunk of its users switch to legal services.
[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.
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.
And this is how I found out.
Anyone got any good alternatives? I was in the middle of the first series of Gundam and I'd prefer not to torrent the entire thing (but i will before i go to crunchy).
Just a reminder to folks not to link directly in this community. I don't want to get ani.social in trouble. Feel free to check out !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com instead.
The Gaming and Music industry (as well as early streaming Netflix) has shown that people are willing to forgo piracy and pay a reasonable price for a service if the service is more convenient and, at the very least, of on-par quality with pirated content. and I'm very sorry for Crunchy, but nothing of this is applicable to them.
I'm not really sure that argument works here. Sure, Crunchyroll has its problems. I could list several things I'd like to see them change. But are the common piracy sites out there any better? I loaded up the first episode of Journal With Witch (arguably Crunchyroll's best show from this season) on both Crunchyroll and on one of the bigger remaining piracy sites. The experience was pretty close to identical. Even the subtitles were word-for-word the same, since those were just ripped from Crunchyroll anyways. You might be able to get better subtitles if you looked for a torrent, but if the numbers in this article are accurate over 95% of anime pirates are streaming directly from sites like the one I visited rather than torrenting. I believe those numbers too. It's not like the torrent numbers are in any way invisible or difficult to measure.
I'm not even saying that we shouldn't pirate. I'm saying that we should be honest with ourselves about why we pirate, and consider if there might be other ways we could give back to the anime industry. It's super cool that Studio Trigger has a patreon. I wish more studios would do that.
As an aside, if you want to talk about bad service I think the worst culprit here is the blu-ray. It's actually absurd that if I shell out for a blu-ray there's no practical way to play the thing on my laptop, phone, or tablet because they've gone out of their way to pay for DRM to make it harder for me to do that.