Forum - View topicNEWS: Crunchyroll to Halt Ad-Supported Streaming Starting With Spring 2022 Season
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VORTIA
 SubscriberPosts: 941 |
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Remember how in the early 2000s Japanese record labels wouldn't allow their artists videos to be streamed because they wanted people to buy overpriced CDs, and Korean record labels uploaded all their stuff to Youtube for free, and now BTS plays in the U.S. Billboard Top 40 and J-Pop is a little known financial wasteland?
Yeah. Get ready for something similar. |
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FilthyCasual
Posts: 2189 |
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So this is the first consequence of the merger, huh.
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Kougeru
 Posts: 5527 |
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Crunchyroll about to lose 90% of their viewership. Not even kidding. Last I checked ad revenue was most their income too
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MFrontier
Posts: 11178 |
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Well that sucks, especially for those who mainly watch with ads.
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CastMember1991
 Posts: 858 |
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Can't say I didn't see it coming, but disappointing nonetheless. I think that seeing how Netflix operates, as well as Sony's own faith-based streaming service Pure Flix (pretty much the Fox News of streaming entertainment) demonstrates, Sony probably thinks people will want a premium product at a premium price. They're known for quality products such as electronics (I own a wide variety of Sony tech, and their WH-1000XM4 noise-cancelling headphones are great), but that doesn't mean they have to cave and turn Crunchyroll into a premium service. What a shame.
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Mune
Posts: 376 Location: Minnesota |
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Just not the current season, but prior seasons will still be available, meaning that spring 2022 won't be available for ad-supported viewing until summer 2022. Then, summer 2022 anime won't be available for ad-supported viewing until fall 2022. Rinse and repeat. Sounds like a mess, but the idea is that you pay to get the content quicker, and not just a week. This also might be a way to curb some traffic, as we don't know what the current capacity for CR's servers is and what they can handle after this merger.
It's actually against CR's ToS, so I don't recommend it. Netflix is also testing the CR model in other countries to eliminate shared accounts to maximize profits. Hulu and HiDive have multiple user accounts. |
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Akemi Tachibana
 Posts: 50 Location: Chesapeake, VA |
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So instead of giving fans a legal free alternative to piracy, by watching anime free with ads that ads profits to Crunchyroll, they take that away so people will return to watching anime illegally on websites that do the same thing. Piracy websites will see a lovely increase in ad profits.
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Beatdigga
 Posts: 4371 Location: New York |
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This seems...unwise. Especially when you've made it a binary choice between it and the Hulu/Netflix drip down or just plain piracy, which seems to be more and more often, the anime fan's first choice when confronted with financial hurdles. (Seriously, "this VA said something I didn't like! PIRATE! This translator supported a political position! PIRATE!") With the market expanding as it is, restricting access is the absolute worst thing you can do.
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Wyvern
 Posts: 1555 |
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Funny how Crunchyroll could afford to do free ad-supported streams for years when they were an independnt company, but now that they're owned by an $80 billion megaconglomerate suddenly they can't provide that anymore? This is just pure greed.
It's going to hurt anime in the long run, too. First Crunchy nearly monopolize the business with the Funimation merger, now they put everything behind a paywall. In the long run, all that does is mean fewer people will get into anime, which means fewer customers for Crunchyroll. The ad-supported streams were how a lot of kids and casual fans became more devoted fans, and now that's going to be over. Sounds like another case of a huge company buying a business they don't actually understand. |
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ErikaD.D
Posts: 659 |
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Crunchyroll is sending "F-ck you" to non-subscriber users, including those who are low income. Watch free with ads after one week model is dead. Won't be surprised if CR will raising prices like Netflix.
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Erufailon4
Posts: 193 Location: Finland |
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Since ads can be blocked quite easily and the resolution was not limited, the only actual incentive for anyone to upgrade from the free plan to premium was always the one-week delay of new episodes. Now that wait is going to get even longer - possibly eternal - but I do wonder how much good it will actually do them.
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Yuvelir
 Posts: 1558 |
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To be fair, they will raise prices even if it is enough.
The last couple of headphones I've bought are from Sony and I must say, I'm quite displeased with them! |
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sharkticon
Posts: 30 |
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Honestly, this probably would have happened without the merger and is probably the right move for the company, even if it does result in an increase in piracy.
You have to keep in mind, they make a small fraction of a cent per ad view. I have seen rates for streaming ads in the one third a cent per view range, so assuming no ad blockers, CR likely makes less than 2 cents per viewer watching 8 ads attached to an episode. Even assuming CR gets better than average rates, a free viewer would have to watch 250 to 375 episodes a month to bring in the same income as a $10 subscription, and the latter user is using less ancillary costs such as bandwidth. That 250 number is also still more than double the number of new episodes offered a month. This last season, I watched one seasonal anime, and caught up on two seasons of another anime, so I watched about 36 episodes on CR. I pay for a $10 subscription, because I don't like waiting a week for new episodes. If I was a free member, and didn't use an ad blocker, they would have made about $0.75 off me. Ad blockers are also probably the main driving force behind this, not the merger. Let's be honest, ads have gotten increasingly intrusive, and the only way to not have a user hostile web browsing experience is to use a ad blocker. From there, about 64% of millennials use ad blockers. So, we can probably cut their expected income per free viewer by about half. The cold reality is, they probably break even if less than 5% of free viewers convert to $10 subscriptions. If 10% do, it will be a runaway success. And that is before including benefits such as reduced bandwidth costs from the free users no longer visiting, and no longer having to maintain the portion of their codebase related to those ads. TL;DR - Yes it sucks, but it is the absolute right decision for Cruncyroll. This was always going to happen eventually. It likely has more to do with ad blockers than the Funimation merger. |
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09jcg
Posts: 523 |
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sharkticon
Posts: 30 |
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Crunchyroll didn't exist when I was 14. I became a fan watching the Sci-Fi channel, Cartoon Network, and Saturday morning cartoons on various channels. Anime is even more culturally ubiquitous now. There will still be new fans. |
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