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INTEREST: Wall Street Journal Reports on Manga Piracy


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agila61



Joined: 22 Feb 2009
Posts: 3213
Location: NE Ohio
PostPosted: Thu Jul 22, 2010 12:09 am Reply with quote
nightjuan wrote:
agila61 wrote:

The demands that can be satisfied are those where the amount that people are willing to spend covers the full economic cost of production, including a return to funds at risk and for use of the resources tied up in the production.


Which, hypothetically speaking, could always be met by charging the same or a proportional amount of the already established price, taking into account that the cost of production itself would vary and that the number of potential buyers could be increased through appropriate marketing, possibly leading to greater profits in the long term.


Its easy to handwave when its not your money and business enterprise being gambled on a proposed strategy.

(1) "Charging the same or proportional amount of the already established price". This must be talking about printed manga, since there is no already established successful price point for digital manga.

(2) "taking into account that the cost of production itself would vary" ... one of the main hurdles for the printed manga is that the biggest costs of production are themselves fixed. The biggest sellers can therefore be sold at a greater profit at the same price point at which more marginal titles represent a real risk of financial loss.

(3) "and that the number of potential buyers could be increased through appropriate marketing, possibly leading to greater profits in the long term." If you know of a appropriate marketing strategy that can increase the number of potential buyers sufficiently to ensure that titles considered marginal can instead of assured of covering their overheads, you ought to bring your "secret sauce" to the attention of the manga publishers. Unless, of course, it is mere vague hypothetical speculation that such an appropriate marketing strategy exists.
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Sunday Silence



Joined: 22 Jun 2010
Posts: 2047
PostPosted: Fri Jul 23, 2010 4:16 am Reply with quote
agila61 wrote:
If you know of a appropriate marketing strategy that can increase the number of potential buyers sufficiently to ensure that titles considered marginal can instead of assured of covering their overheads, you ought to bring your "secret sauce" to the attention of the manga publishers. Unless, of course, it is mere vague hypothetical speculation that such an appropriate marketing strategy exists.


Maybe if the companies don't treat their prospective customers as criminals, maybe they could get semi-accurate feels of what the demand is. If it worked for them back then, it could still work now.

Life is all about risks. You need to take some in order to get ahead.
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Undead Unicorn



Joined: 23 Jul 2010
Posts: 5
PostPosted: Fri Jul 23, 2010 4:35 am Reply with quote
zeonozero wrote:
This is good. Finally a crackdown on pirating. If this was to continue, as we all can probably guess, the manga industry will continue to fall from lack of money being bought on the actual manga.
Scanlations are good as long as it is legal. Some of the older series and the most popular should be put out. But if a company bought the rights, then the site should take it off.
I have gone to those sites and some series will say it has been removed because the company ordered them too. That is good, even if i really wanted to read them.
Anyway, after all this saying, its good that this is being more tracked and monitored. Just hope that it does not fall short or people give up


This is way I HATE both sides of this debate. Doing this isn't helping anyone.

If it wasn't for pirates, Melancholy of SH would have never made it to the states. With it however its sales have gone down to what they could have been without it.

Sites like One Manga and Manga Fox expose consumers to products they wouldn't been exposed to otherwise, whether its because of JAPANESENESS or just because its too off beat or it just didn't catch a publishers eye for a thousand different reasons.

On the other hand, its actually easier to pirate manga than anything else. And I do mean anything. So I can actually buy the argument sites like One Manga are detracting from the sales from things like Naruto. Sort of.

Dedicated moochers already know to go the scanlators websites, and this alliance ISN'T going after them. They've said as much.

I know the Elitist on here want to whine about the kids in there backyard getting into manga, getting it ILLEGALLY and I know all this scanalotors sites are going down and the kids from One Manga are whining.

Your both right in being ticked off. Something needs to be done, much like Funimation has. Or like the former theives called Crunchy Roll has. Its a simple fact manga needs to get into some form of digital distribution. People want convenience. People would be more willing to try new things if there cheaper.

If they don't meet that expectation, its doesn't matter how well they do in this battle. One Manga will be back up in a year or two after Viz and others fold. Manga has plenty of other competitors that will offer such services, like Comics, Television Shows, Films, ect.
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agila61



Joined: 22 Feb 2009
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 23, 2010 1:24 pm Reply with quote
Sunday Silence wrote:
agila61 wrote:
If you know of a appropriate marketing strategy that can increase the number of potential buyers sufficiently to ensure that titles considered marginal can instead of assured of covering their overheads, you ought to bring your "secret sauce" to the attention of the manga publishers. Unless, of course, it is mere vague hypothetical speculation that such an appropriate marketing strategy exists.


Maybe if the companies don't treat their prospective customers as criminals, maybe they could get semi-accurate feels of what the demand is. If it worked for them back then, it could still work now.

Life is all about risks. You need to take some in order to get ahead.


There is no evidence at all that indicates they are treaying their prospective customers as criminals. They are treating sites like OneManga as criminals but ... well, they are criminals, so that makes sense.
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agila61



Joined: 22 Feb 2009
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Location: NE Ohio
PostPosted: Fri Jul 23, 2010 1:26 pm Reply with quote
Undead Unicorn wrote:
If it wasn't for pirates, Melancholy of SH would have never made it to the states.


That's a bit exagerated: the Melancholy of SH anime would definitely have been picked up in market conditions of 2003, when piracy was a small fraction of what it is today, and a successful anime would have led to the manga being picked up if it had not been picked up already.
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Undead Unicorn



Joined: 23 Jul 2010
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 23, 2010 4:12 pm Reply with quote
agila61 wrote:
Undead Unicorn wrote:
If it wasn't for pirates, Melancholy of SH would have never made it to the states.


That's a bit exaggerated: the Melancholy of SH anime would definitely have been picked up in market conditions of 2003, when piracy was a small fraction of what it is today, and a successful anime would have led to the manga being picked up if it had not been picked up already.


Try for being rude, but lol NO. Bandai themselves admitted that they didn't know the series would have appiled to us Westerns until piraters..well subbed it.

You can call a banna an apple, but that doesn't mean you're eating apple pie.

Take a step back for a moment Agi. I know your a loyal consumer, but its actually necessary for us to chide the publishers for stupid behavior. They have a hard, steep road in front of them. The transition is horrible and tiring process.

But they have to adapt. The days of just selling a niche product like a mainstream one is over. This isn't the 90's. Words like weeaboo are common terms for anyone who shows any indication for liking manga and anime. We are now at the bottom of the nerd hierarchy.

They have to appeal to the customer and his wants more than ever. Customers want near simultaneous releases to the Japanese releases. They want to sample their products before they buy them.

Yes, I know their are problems between the Japanese and English publishers. They need to find solutions to them.

They don't seem to even acknowledge this here in the West...manga wise anyway. We at least should.
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agila61



Joined: 22 Feb 2009
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 23, 2010 10:20 pm Reply with quote
Undead Unicorn wrote:
Try for being rude, but lol NO. Bandai themselves admitted that they didn't know the series would have appiled to us Westerns until piraters..well subbed it.


Link? A lot of these stories that circulate around are just myths, like the myth that a manga publishing house said that their marketing department made recommendations based on scanlation popularity, when the actual statement said nothing of the sort.

It might not have been Bandai, but in the 2003 market, someone would have given it a run. Corrected for inflation, the anime market was twice the size that it is today.
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Takeyo



Joined: 25 Mar 2008
Posts: 736
PostPosted: Fri Jul 23, 2010 10:59 pm Reply with quote
Not to get involved in the conversation, but why the references to the 2003 market when discussing a show that aired in 2006? Just curious.
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agila61



Joined: 22 Feb 2009
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 23, 2010 11:55 pm Reply with quote
Takeyo wrote:
Not to get involved in the conversation, but why the references to the 2003 market when discussing a show that aired in 2006? Just curious.


In terms of total revenues, the North American anime market in 2006 was already in decline from its peak around 2002/2003.
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Sunday Silence



Joined: 22 Jun 2010
Posts: 2047
PostPosted: Sat Jul 24, 2010 2:47 am Reply with quote
agila61 wrote:
A lot of these stories that circulate around are just myths, like the myth that a manga publishing house said that their marketing department made recommendations based on scanlation popularity, when the actual statement said nothing of the sort.


Maybe it was a poor choice of words on the writers part, so here ya go, the FULL account. (bolded some important bits)

Quote:
The term is a Web-based neologism; a portmanteau word that fuses scan and translation. It's a buzzword you have to be in the know to know, but plugging it into Google produces nearly 11,000 hits. That fact alone is an indication of the breadth of this phenomenon, which is to commercially translated manga what Linux is to Windows -- a collectively generated alternative supported by a thriving and passionate community, produced as a labor of love and distributed for free download via the Internet.

The process is simple (now that personal scanners, Photoshop and the Internet are widely available, anyway): "Raws," or original copies of Japanese manga volumes, are scanned into digital formats; these are distributed via the Internet to legions of bilingual translators, who send rough scripts on to editors, who polish the language and then paste the translated dialogue into the word bubbles of the scans. After a quick quality-control check, the scanlation is ready for release via IRC (a worldwide chat network frequented by hacker types), peer-to-peer technologies such as BitTorrent or direct Web download.

While scanlators operate somewhat outside legal boundaries -- the works they're republishing are copyrighted and proprietary, and there isn't a penny of licensing money exchanging hands -- their existence is tolerated by the commercial publishing houses because, frankly, scanlators play the invaluable role of identifying new titles that are hotly in demand. Would "Fruits Basket" -- a quirky romantic comedy about a young girl who becomes the housekeeper for a family whose members are cursed to transform into animals whenever they're embraced by members of the opposite sex -- have been picked up for U.S. release without its overwhelming popularity on scanlation sites? Possibly -- but the built-in fan base scanlators provided has helped turn the series into one of TokyoPop's best-selling titles.

"Frankly, I find it kind of flattering, not threatening," says TokyoPop's Steve Kleckner. "To be honest, I believe that if the music industry had used downloading and file sharing properly, it would have increased their business, not eaten into it. And, hey, if you get 2,000 fans saying they want a book you've never heard of, well, you gotta go out and get it."
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Sheleigha



Joined: 09 May 2008
Posts: 1674
PostPosted: Sat Jul 24, 2010 3:01 am Reply with quote
...except now that Tokyopop is DEFINATELY not what it used to be, after making plenty of poor business decisions...
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Sunday Silence



Joined: 22 Jun 2010
Posts: 2047
PostPosted: Sat Jul 24, 2010 3:33 am Reply with quote
Sheleigha wrote:
...except now that Tokyopop is DEFINITELY not what it used to be, after making plenty of poor business decisions...


Bad business decisions aside, TOKYOPOP back in the day seemed to have a good idea. You just gotta wonder why their advice wasn't heeded by all those involved.

The industry had what, 7 YEARS to figure it out. And all it amounts to today is the shutting down of scanlation sites and angry fans demanding blood.
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enurtsol



Joined: 01 May 2007
Posts: 14877
PostPosted: Sat Jul 24, 2010 9:46 am Reply with quote
Sunday Silence wrote:

Quote:

And, hey, if you get 2,000 fans saying they want a book you've never heard of, well, you gotta go out and get it."


Heheh, they want "to buy it" or want it "for free." Laughing
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Sunday Silence



Joined: 22 Jun 2010
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PostPosted: Sat Jul 24, 2010 1:00 pm Reply with quote
enurtsol wrote:
Sunday Silence wrote:

Quote:

And, hey, if you get 2,000 fans saying they want a book you've never heard of, well, you gotta go out and get it."


Heheh, they want "to buy it" or want it "for free." Laughing


For all we know, back then, people wanted to pay for manga, not rip it off. Understand that scanlations were supposedly HELPING businesses like TOKYOPOP chose titles to license.

Now? Well, we're pretty much calling each other loosers.....
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asura_wings



Joined: 29 Jun 2008
Posts: 31
PostPosted: Sat Jul 24, 2010 1:26 pm Reply with quote
I would like the legally Translated Manga to be distributed by CD or DVD in with the readers bundled as well in the CD because I feel some manga are hard to collect because of they are very long and hard to store in the bookshelves..
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