Forum - View topicNEWS: Google: Unauthorized Manga Site Is Among Top 1,000 Sites
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suika
 Posts: 33 |
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You know, there's that chance that VIZ actually does want to release Naruto/Bleach simultaneously+digitally just as they are doing with Rinne but the Japanese licensor doesn't want to hear any of it? So could it be that Rumiko Takahashi/Shonen Sunday/Shogakukan are more open-minded about digital distribution whereas Shueisha/Shonen Jump/Tite Kubo/Masashi Kishimoto are flat out resistant to it? Because there are many manga artists out there who absolutely DO NOT want their work distributed digitally. I love VIZ and I love what they are doing with Rinne and would love to see them apply this model to other series. But hypothetically speaking, the simultaneous release problem may not solely be on VIZ/American/Overseas licensees. |
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Haterater
 Posts: 1727 |
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I did remember reading about how some manga pulishers/authors don't want to try digital as well. Some would like a balance of digital and physical, with physical taking slight priority. I have a feeling that its mainly people who still want it the old fashion way of doing things or feel like its the superior way to view it. I can understand that, but I have a feeling they will need a wake up call, just like how many newspaper businesses did.
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ArsenicSteel
 Posts: 2370 |
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Just because newspapers went digital does not mean all physical text media has to do the same.
For products that are not subject heavily dependent on time like text books, comics, manga, and novels I still prefer the physical media. Books are highly mobile. |
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Ashen Phoenix
 Posts: 2907 |
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Same here, on both the guilty aspect, and the not-licensed-vs-already-licensed series argument. I think it wouldn't bother me nearly as much if those sites didn't still offer series like Naruto, Bleach, FMA, etc. Series that are not only already licensed, but being released quickly and legally in the U.S. It's like asking those who go online to read chapter xxx of whatever, "C'mon! What more do you want?" 
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agila61
 Posts: 3213 Location: NE Ohio |
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However, its a massive shake-up in the economics of print publishing when printed material becomes one of several channels, and is no longer the cheapest of those channels on a per issue basis. For over five hundred years, the cheapest method of copying information and distributing it has been printing, and our whole information gathering and distribution system has become organized around the economics of the printing press. And in the last twenty years, that has changed. Some people are always innovators, some are always early adopters, some are always late adopters, and some are always holding onto the old ways until the bitter end. There is no reason for manga publishing to be any different. We are still somewhere in the innovation and early adoption stage, where there is still experimentation with coming up with systems that actually work to refund the cost of creating the work. In that stage, its natural that some will be reluctant to experiment with a particular approach until it has proven itself. After all, those who move too early often find themselves not on the leading edge, but on the bleeding edge, where there are some but not all of the pieces in place required to make a success of it. And so when the economics shifts and a suddenly far more competitive environment means that "the average" publication is losing money ... some will set their caps at just being enough better than average that they are not the ones that get shaken out. Ideally, print-on-demand would allow online manga content providers to sell a wide variety of their content as printed manga for those who preferred that. And, indeed, outside of Japan, the online views could end up being the functional equivalent of the weeklies that serialize the manga, and the printed sales the functional equivalent of the collected works that are normally required to cover the full overheads and go into profit. The economics there is you set the price point where it can cover the direct printing cost, handling cost, print royalty and contribute to overhead, and as you go you learn which level of online viewership implies a level of print sales that will offer a positive return. The fact that it might be a $12 price point instead of a $10 price point is no big problem ... because the legit online viewing means that commercialization does not drop off a cliff once a particular printed manga is out of a particular customers range. Except ... color Print On Demand is all or nothing - 8 cents a page for the option of color inserts means a raw printing cost of $16/200pp, even if there are only a few color pages. Meanwhile the b&w PoD are reputed to not yet do grey levels and half tones at sufficient quality for art books, including manga. And if the "cheap but ... well, OK, its cheap!" end of the spectrum is the online viewing ... the printed manga needs to be the quality side. So what the market needs for that strategy and what the technology can deliver do not yet line up. A second strategy, assuming that a print run is required, is to attempt to crowdfinance the print run itself, with people subscribing to be "supporting subscribers" (and get listed in a long credits section), the print run only proceeding when its production costs are fully subscribed, and then as it sells, the supporting subscribers receive a share of the revenue (for the $20 level of subscription, to roll over into buying more manga or ad-free online viewing) ... understanding that the majority of releases will not cover their full cost of production so that $20 will normally mean less than $20 back. But there is a chicken and the egg problem there ... to get it up and running, you need a broad based community from which to recruit subscribing members, you need the subscribing members to generate the higher-return print run, and you need the higher-returning print runs to ensure that mangaka want their work available on the online viewership site. So while it might be a system that can continue once it gets started ... how does it get started? For the second strategy, I'd expect it would have to get started in some niche where there are works that cannot get distributed internationally under the traditional system, so there is no existing international market for the mangaka to put at risk by trying the new system. Then if it works and gets going, it would grow from that seed into a system that can start to legally aggregate more and more works. For that one, the technology is there, but it requires an innovative financing system, which means likely bumps along the road that will only become clear once the road starts being traveled upon. |
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The Xenos
 Posts: 1519 Location: Boston |
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I can't stand sites like One Manga. Though I confess I'm more used to file sharing of zipped files and not these lazy sites that have page by page viewers. How lazy are you that you have to have a web site organize your files for you? At least with p2p file sharing scanlations you're not generating web traffic for money from ads. These people are about on par with the HK bootleggers back in the day. Sure it's still violation of copyright, but it wasn't a blatant and didn't make money off of it.
Now I confess I downloaded stuff off peer to peer. Hell, I still do sometimes. When people are already online or friends at a club are talking about spoilers about the newest chapter and you're afraid of ruining, I admit I cave in and download. Though I've cut back. I now have piles of in print manga I bought that have gone unread. It's had gotten to the point where I realized I wouldn't read all that I got. The very need to download scanlations had become an act in itself, more important than reading series and caring about particular manga. This is the Pokemon addiction. We gotta catch 'em all. You're not a fan if you like a handful of manga. You have to real them all to be one of the cool kids. You have to read all scanlations the 'cool kids' are reading instead of just finding what you like. It's almost an addictive contest. This generation I'm in is infected with the consumer urge of the 80s amped up to a monstrous degree and is enabled by the infinite consumption abilities of digital technologies. Oh and add on top of that a sense of entitlement. It's a horrific. We're all so far gone with out free digital downloads that we don't even realize the real world consequences. We forget that people get paid to make these books and when we read them online for free, those creators get nothing. We bitch about getting legit online distribution and think this illegal method which gives the creator no notice is the way. It's not. It just makes things worse. The industry is collapsing due to us being termites slowly eating out the supports to fill out insatiable hunger. If we don't realize or admit we're bringing down the house that feeds us, we're truly going to bring it down around us. In reply to cone commenter of the Robot Six post that was defending One Manga, I had this to say: You're views of online scanlations and copyright laws are really skewed and naive. Yes, of course posting copy written material from anywhere in the world is illegal. And you sure seem to stick your head in the sand when it comes to looking at how the manga industry is collapsing. An entire generation of fans, of which I'm at the start of, is growing up getting manga for free. Publishing companies are dying. Meanwhile a site that bootlegs their martial is one of the most visited one the net. You've got to you have head shoved pretty firmly up there to not make any connection and think things are all fine and dandy. Also, I really doubt that most of the scanlations being read are not available in the US. And guess what, if you want to whine and bitch about books not in the US, but still don't want to be a thief, put your money where you mouth is and order the Japanese copies of the manga online. There are dozens of Japanese import stores online that sell manga in the US. Never mind you treat American companies that bring titles to the US as if they're the criminals. Please. CMX's Tenjo Tenge and 4Kids's One Piece fiascos are the exceptions nowadays. Stop using them as a lame excuse to get free entertainment you have no intention of ever paying for, you cheapskate. You're only hurting people who like anime and want to see it popular here in the US. Quit spreading your lies and straw-men. You say you're a fan of anime and Japanese culture, but you surely are giving the middle finger to Japan and its creators. You say it only matters if their word is licensed in the US, as if their Japanese copyright is written on toilet paper, as if their entire industry in Japan is worthless. With fans like you, who needs enemies. |
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The Xenos
Posts: 1519 Location: Boston |
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Personally I can't stand to give up print and paper. Yet maybe for an instant release and first reading I could buy into paying a little money for a read and then buying it collected in print later. |
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Hiyugi
 Posts: 59 |
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I try to read some of the pages here and there...
To think that these websites who host the content out there from manga scans and anime streams are making a ton of money from all the visits they get everyday. If you think about it, every time people visit those sites they're ripping themselves off from the manga/anime that will possibly get canceled in the near future. But to think that every page they visit on those sites counts as cash to them... I did not know that which is very startling... Here's a scenario, for every page that has advertisements, be it Anime Streams or Manga Scans, they get about $0.10 per visit/person. Now if it was a very popular shonen manga [Insert Name Here] that posted its' latest chapter for the week. The manga chapter has about 16-19 pages, add that up and they get like $1.90 for each chapter...(This is really ****** up). Let's also say they get like over 100,000 visitors for just that 1 chapter with 16-19 pages that would equal to 1,900,000 hits per page. And if we times $0.10 to 1,900,000 hits per page this will get them $190,000... Y'know it cost money to keep sites like that up and buying the latest harddrives and computers to keep up with the times. These people definitely don't have jobs, but they sure found a convenient loophole to make money off of...even if it is small figure. It would be inconceivable if this was true, are these people even paying taxes...I don't think so. But more importantly, if it is true, people are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to these websites when it should be the other way around.  I'm pretty sure the FBI has their eye on these websites like they did with that other website...however when it comes to Japanese Comic Books (Manga) they are probably not going to lift a finger to help foreign companies that some US companies support. I just have that feeling is all....but really wrong if people are making a ton money from advertisements.
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agila61
Posts: 3213 Location: NE Ohio |
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For banner ads and click throughs and pop ups divide by something like 100 to 1,000, but that's the basis idea. They don't get $100m for 1b in site views, but they'd plausibly get $1m, which is $1m that the manga industry could definitely put to good use. And @The Xenos, yes, its naive to think that publishing increases the risk of getting ripped off ... since all the really valuable ones to put online are getting ripped off anyway. Better to make it easier for those who'd rather get legit but are not committed to have a legit source that generates income to the manga industry ... that works both ways, by also cutting the revenues to the manga view sites. But it does seem to be a common misconception ... there are anime publishers who have the same (IMO misguided) view. |
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LordRedhand
 Posts: 1472 Location: Middle of Nowhere, Indiana |
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Well coming from an Author on the Cobert Report " I don't trust the White Man's deal." when the question was asked why he wasn't putting his book online (yes book, no pictures or anything, just a book.) He further elaborated on that if he put his book online he would loose his rights as people online do not respect them and once it was up there he would be powerless to do anything to really stop or prevent it, even if he put it online as a preventative measure against that. It also is worth mentioning that some suggestions of pay what you want has also meet with some scrutiny when the latest example embraced by a group of software/video game developers offered a DRM-Free, pay what you want for it package for their products, thus trying to strip most of the excuses used to justify the actions of piracy. The results where less than impressive, the retail price of the pack if it went into stores would be $80, the average across the three OS systems (Window PC, Mac, and Linux) those who felt what this pack was worth was barely over $9.15, a very steep discount for a pack of new games but it gets worse a full quarter of the down loaders who downloaded from the official site felt that $0.01 was too much to pay and actually pirated it from their site so not only refusing to even put down a penny but to also cost the companies money by taking up bandwidth on their site, this of course not including those who felt it was okay after doing that to put it on torrent sites for their "friends" to download for free. One can understand why there is a little bit of hesitance to put something online, if that is the normal response to it. |
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agila61
Posts: 3213 Location: NE Ohio |
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Precisely. It would be very simple to mistakenly evaluate that as "that is $70.85 less than what we charge", when it is likely closer to "that is $9.15 more than the average we normally get from those freeloaders". The advantage that manga publishers have over software publishers is that they have a higher quality version of the item to sell. Software on a copy protected CD-ROM is inferior to a non-DRM'd direct download, while manga in print is in almost all circumstances superior to viewing online ... so while publishing online on a legit online viewer site would be bringing in directly pennies per volume ... and more than the bootleg viewers can, since with rights to the content they have a broader ad market to draw upon ... it would provide a very real opportunity to sell more printed manga to the "stumbleduponit" crowd. In this scenario, the online viewing takes the role of the cheap weekly serials on cheap paper, and the printed volumes the same role as printed volumes in the Japanese industry. |
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LordRedhand
Posts: 1472 Location: Middle of Nowhere, Indiana |
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The question is though is can these developers continue at that rate though? As they have 1. Stopped bundling their software and 2. There are serious questions as to whether they will be around any longer. One thing to keep in mind is that if this was released on disc, at least by the publishers/developers, they would have been/are DRM-free so the argument that they have DRM is moot, at least in the example I've given above. Very likely this experiment did not make up the costs to develop and distribute their product and may bankrupt a few of them (probably why the pack was split up to the individual games and programs after wards in an attempt to make up the shortfall.)
I mean one of them asked why they pirated it and the response where baffling: It had DRM It was too expensive It was too hard/inconvenient to find And of course the tradition information want to be free crowd. With the exception of the last one it shouldn't have had the problems that it had, lacking DRM, having a price which you could set to as low as a penny, as well as being advertised on gaming sites and being released on the internet solely to start. This experiment really was about stripping away nearly all the excuses one makes for piracy and really showed that there is a group that has some serious entitlement issues, as according to most of the sideline people these are start-ups trying to do what they feel is customer demand (or at least flipping a pure consumer into buying customer) and are still getting blasted apart. |
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G00st543
Posts: 9 |
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Maybe I'm a bit mistaken with this point, however... I'll go under the interpretation that you thought the "humble indie bundle" campaign ending at this point is an admission of defeat because of the piracy, which is not true. It was a week-long promotional campaign for charity. Albeit this does not at all speak well for the pirates, who were mean-spirited enough to pirate the bloody games, but I digress... You speak of the campaign as if it were a failure. From what I'm reading, these stats seem to suggest otherwise. It seems they were all able to make a total of ~$1.4m US, with each individual participant (developers and charities) making, at the lowest, $166k after merchant costs. I'm not involved in the industry, but bandwidth doesn't cost THAT much, so that number seems pretty high for weekly profits. That's 23k a day on average. That's quite a bit, especially for games that are few years old. Onto the topic at hand: I'll admit to using onemanga. I read a Hatsune Miku manga on there once, and I remember using it to show a friend a page of Higurashi when they cry. Though knowing that the creator of the website wishes to sell their website for that high of a sum doesn't sit right with me. However, if a friend wishes to link me to a page, I don't really feel right being zealous about it either. Piracy is an issue the manga industry will have to address, just like every industry affected by the rise of the internet in homes, and the ease of sharing. How is it going to do that? I don't know, but maybe doing a week-long pay-as-you wish campaign for a back catalog of out of print-manga in pdf form wouldn't be a bad idea. I'm highly skeptical about the kind of long-term benefit eliminating piracy altogether will have, many anime fans got INTO anime through piracy. I know the very thing that got me back into watching anime was pirating Love Hina subs as a teenager. A lot of my friends share similar stories. And now that I have a job and am making decent money, I try my hardest to pay for everything. On the manga end, at least, I've been pretty successful. I haven't seen any new anime in a while. Also, one thing I DO know is that if someone were to take down any aggregator, 5 will pop up in its stead. The music and movie industries are beginning to shift their models around. And while I'll admit that comics and books are different from music and movies, much like a rubber ball is very much different from a medicine ball, they all had to face the real issue of piracy. The best way to face that, from what I see, is innovation. Oh dear, I hope this was coherent... I rambled quite a bit, didn't I? ^^; |
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Sven Viking
Posts: 1039 |
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Yeah, about the humble indie bundle: All of the games had already been released as individual titles, in some cases three years ago. Splitting the bundle wasn't a sign of failure -- the limited-time promotion was actually extended, and after running for quite a bit longer than originally scheduled, things simply retuned to normal. It can't bankrupt anybody, because it was pretty-much all just extra profit added on top of their normal sales, from people who wouldn't otherwise have purchased.
As far as the piracy rate goes, it's obviously sad; however, World of Goo's piracy rate was previously close to 90%. Cutting it to 25% is actually pretty amazing, and far lower than for most games with expensive DRM. Though it exposes the people who seriously will never pay for anything if they can avoid it, it also shows that others will buy if the obstacles/excuses are removed. The average price point may also have something to do with the fact that some people already owned many of the games included. I owned three of them, so didn't pay as much as I otherwise would have (though I did buy two gift copies). I've actually bought World of Goo five times now. First by itself, then with the humble bundle, then with a separate Steam bundle (for the other games) -- plus two gift purchases. If I see good games selling cheaply enough, I have difficulty preventing myself from buying them, even in cases where I never get time to actually install them. High prices and a 0% piracy rate are useless if nobody buys your product. |
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littlegreenwolf
 Posts: 4796 Location: Seattle, WA |
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I fail to see how the current issue in the manga industry isn't comparable to what happened with the recording/music industry in the early 2000s.
You have a product, previously available in hard copy format that people are copying into digital format, then sharing online. Then came in the aggregator sites/p2p clients such as Napster, and all the while the online "music community" got used to the idea of free music while the record industry struggled to stop them, going as far as prosecuting fans, and had an even harder time getting a profitable model to sell their songs online. No one really thought that people who previously had been getting the music for free would pay for it, but iTunes proved it was possible. Sure, there's still a ton of pirates out there who refuse to pay a single penny for the music they download, but there's still enough buyers to support the industry. The industry just had to learn how to adapt. I don't think the manga industry is much different. If onemanga is Napster in this instance, the manga industry, mainly the Japanese publishers, need to get in gear or they face major problems down the road. Luckily for the manga industry, a digital copy doesn't compare to a physical copy of a book, unlike with music. Scanlation quality varies from professional to a quick hack job, and in the end a large number of people still prefer to read it in book form, and to collect in book form. I don't think the numbers of viewers shows an good example of the number of lost sales for the manga industry as a whole because people are claiming they buy them. I'm not proud to admit it, and don't think I'm justified in any way to get the latest chapter, but I read the latest chapter of Naruto weekly online, though I don't use onemanga. I may read each chapter weekly, but I also own each and every volume Viz has released to date. My brother still even has a subscription to Shonen Jump here in the US, so Viz is getting our money both ways, though at the age he is, I don't think he'll keep subscribing to Shonen Jump for much longer. I think the problem is, exluding the freeloaders who will never pay for anything (they will always exist online) is that people have found online scanlations as a "weekly sampler", and that the reason it's not a huge problem in Japan is because they already have these in magazine format. A person buys a magazine, reads all the random chapters of a manga (a friend may even borrow it at no cost), and they get their weekly chapter of whatever manga they follow. There is no guarantee that the reader of the magazine will go out to buy the book form after buying the magazine, but the incentive is that the magazine form is low quality and big and bulky. You try collecting a manga in that form and you'll have a house completely cluttered full of the magazines. Companies here have tried to offer magazines to readers here, but the demand isn't for a monthly manga-fix, it's weekly, and even at monthly, with the rate magazines are dying in this country, non really have a chance to thrive. America just doesn't have the numbers to justify the expenses a weekly printed magazine would cost to print and distribute. Scanlations are the answer to the "weekly sampler" that the US industry has yet to offer. There's a huge demand for the weekly chapters, and digital is proving to be a format that the fans obviously will go with. People can continue to insist fans should just be patient and wait, but as long as Japan has it, people here will want it too. You can't expect a bunch of young teenage kids (and older fans) to be mature about the situation. They're the digital generation, and they're going to find one way or another to get what they want online. Publishers now need to find some way to keep them paying for it. I think a lot of publishers want to experiment with it, but like some have said, the Japanese license holders may be against it. If they manage, I personally think they could offer a weekly selection of chapters online for a low subscription rate, and even cut the costs with advertisements, and writing it out to some degree as an advertising/promotional expense. As an extra incentive to pull in more subscribers, have exclusive manga-oriented junk to give away like the Japanese weekly magazines (I think some tried this here with the actual magazines). I'd love to see ANN interview Viz about how their ventures into digital distribution is working, especially with Rin-Ne, and if they have plans to expand, and am even more curious with what YenPress is planning to do with their magazine's transition to digital. |
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