If all pirated sites were to shut down, would you be willing to pay for anime?

It'll be a cold day in hell before I give Crunchyroll any money. I watched anime illegally before streaming was a thing and I'll still be doing it long after all those sites are gone.

They are the company with the most blu-rays on the western market, and they have a partnership with Walmart to sell their blu-rays and some manga physically.

Also $30 for a blu-ray is pretty good, specially compared to how they are priced in Japan.
I even bought some for less than $25



wdym by that?
Cause both Hidive and CR have uncensored anime, and CR has even helped produce some uncensored ecchi titles.

I am legitimately loosing faith in humanity reading this thread. People really think they deserve free art and complain about „bad companies“ whilst stealing. Hilarious. I‘m poor af but want to support the artists I love, so I pay for as much as I possibly can. These comments are so concerning and entitled. How people are proud of pirating is beyond me.

@Vampire_Lord
It shouldnt be just one platform. There should be no exclusive rights at all so every platform can have it all if they want. The selling point should be reliability of service and features and cost and how much goes to the creators.

I'm pretty extremely certain that if it wasn't for piracy, anime would not have spread so far, I'm sure I would not have found my favourites without it, and without it I would not have bought Aria the Masterpiece and Natsume manga.
I bought random japanese stories (with real money) due to exposure from "piracy". Then Crunchyroll came along and yeah they seem to be a divider.

But in short, do I think japanese animation is struggling bco piracy? No I think it was discovered by the world partly BECAUSE of piracy.

When did that happen???

What character are you talking about?

What does that manga have to do with Crunchyroll????

And what does a One Piece game have to do with Crunchyroll????

Seriously, I don't understand what you're thinking...

one word: torrent.
reason i dont pay is because i hate subscription services (sometimes i dont watch enough to warrant paying monthly), sometimes official subs suck and some shows arent even available even if you pay.
it simply takes less effort and i get a better experience when i torrent my shows

Nope. You won't take my precious €. :(

Let's say someone bought one of those DVDs a month back in 2004. For $360, they'd get roughly 48 episodes of anime, or between 1-4 typical TV anime, generally 1-3 years after their Japanese broadcasts. Adjusting for inflation, that amount is about $50 a month / $600 a year today. So spending that same amount in 2024 could subscribe to Netflix, Disney+ (albeit with ads for those first two), Crunchyroll, HiDive, RetroCrush, and Amazon Prime, and get access to virtually all airing/seasonal anime during the JP broadcasts, substantial anime back catalogues, a wide range of non-anime media content, and whatever other benefits come with Prime. I'm not saying the current system is perfect, but can we agree that things have gotten dramatically cheaper and faster over the past two decades? And that's the worst-case, "perfect angel subscribing to literally all services" scenario -- surely there are reasonable options between "pay for everything" and "pay for nothing."

First off, those licensing fees can be enough to cover an entire production budget, and services also add royalty payments based on view counts. A few other questions:

* Where does Crunchyroll share its insider financial data on licensing and compensation structures with its detractors?
* Does CR have some mysterious separate income that it uses to pay licensing fees and royalties to Japanese content owners, while giving all its subscriber income to dub seiyuu and production staff?
* I'm not too well-versed in the #StandWithVic Cinematic Universe, but if I'm reading this right, being accused of sexual misconduct is bad (Chiplock), but calling out sexual misconduct (Rial/Toye/Marchi) is also bad?

I already do this, but for unknown and old animes I need to look for piracy, which is not cool, but big companies do not make many ovas or old animes available.

Let's say someone bought one of those DVDs a month back in 2004. For $360, they'd get roughly 48 episodes of anime, or between 1-4 typical TV anime, generally 1-3 years after their Japanese broadcasts. Adjusting for inflation, that amount is about $50 a month / $600 a year today. So spending that same amount in 2024 could subscribe to Netflix, Disney+ (albeit with ads for those first two), Crunchyroll, HiDive, RetroCrush, and Amazon Prime, and get access to virtually all airing/seasonal anime during the JP broadcasts, substantial anime back catalogues, a wide range of non-anime media content, and whatever other benefits come with Prime. I'm not saying the current system is perfect, but can we agree that things have gotten dramatically cheaper and faster over the past two decades? And that's the worst-case, "perfect angel subscribing to literally all services" scenario -- surely there are reasonable options between "pay for everything" and "pay for nothing."

First off, those licensing fees can be enough to cover an entire production budget, and services also add royalty payments based on view counts. A few other questions:

* Where does Crunchyroll share its insider financial data on licensing and compensation structures with its detractors?
* Does CR have some mysterious separate income that it uses to pay licensing fees and royalties to Japanese content owners, while giving all its subscriber income to dub seiyuu and production staff?
* I'm not too well-versed in the #StandWithVic Cinematic Universe, but if I'm reading this right, being accused of sexual misconduct is bad (Chiplock), but calling out sexual misconduct (Rial/Toye/Marchi) is also bad?

@HiljainenSipuli I mean, buying Blu-ray’s is always an option.