Mangahelpers going Crunchyroll?

[charmian]

It seems the scanlation world has been rocked, as popular scanlation distribution site/forum Mangahelpers seems to have been secretly planning to go legit. A draft of a business plan and an email to a company have been leaked ad posted. Mangahelpers responded, and answered some questions on the matter.

I kind of wonder whether if any company would bite at the idea of collaborating with Mangahelpers. Mangahelpers's real strength is not that they have raws or that they have downloads; it's more that it's frequented by scanlators and translators, and it provides a hangout for them to form groups, recruit, and collaborate. There's a big bank of available translations, also.

How successful was Crunchyroll, anyway?

Comments

[torachan]

Interesting. In the FAQ they mentioned Netcomix, which I think does pretty well. If they could do something similar, it might work out.

Crunchyroll seems pretty popular? I don't know how successful it is in terms of making money, but I know quite a few people who watch stuff on there.

[charmian]

Interesting, although I wonder why if Netcomix is doing so well, why haven't Viz, Tokyopop, et al started up their own similar sites?

Well, I'm more interested in the making money part, though? Like, I know that the traffic they have now is less than it used to be, so I'm wondering whether financially they succeeded.

[torachan]

Viz has started to do some online simultaneous releases. I know they're doing Takahashi Rumiko's new series that way at least.

I really don't know why they don't have (more) read-online sites. It seems like even if they weren't hugely popular, it would still be profitable. They don't have to print any books that way, so they're saving some money right there.

[charmian]

Yeah, that does make sense. Especially because for their out of print titles and whatever, they already have the completed works, so it's not like they would need to have to do anything more than put them on the webpages and start either charging or putting up ads.

[torachan]

I always wonder why book publishers don't do the same. They could offer ebooks or print on demand for out of print titles. Right now they're making no money off them, so why not? I think it's just a case of publishers still being tied to print format and not really wanting to embrace technology.

[charmian]

Indeed. I guess they don't think it's even worth their time? But ebooks and POD would be very useful, especially in this age of the Long Tail now. (Although now they have Google breathing down their necks, so who knows what's going to happen.)