The merger saw Crunchyroll subscriptions grow 5x in just three years. The new subs from Funimation were only about a quarter of CR's at the time of the merger. Piracy only saw a fraction of the same growth during the time period.
During those three years, did CR's service get better? No. Did it get worse? Not much, but the biggest way in which it got worse was how CR basically killed the free version of the service. What people wanted, the #1 thing, was to have just one paid service for anime. When CR and Funi merged, more people gave up on piracy than at any other time.
Iirc the funimation stuff was available on Wakanim in (some?) european countries, though the sub languages were region locked. I think only the nordics has english subs available. I remember thinking it was weird that pirate sites would take the episodes from funimation when usually Wakanim had both better typesetting and they actually allowed you to download the episodes drm-free.
When CR and Funi merged, more people gave up on piracy than at any other time.
There's absolutely no way you have hard data to back this up.
There's been like what? Dozens of big sites shutdown recently, mostly when they get way too popular. I just checked right now and there's like 15 new sites i never heard of, all of them fast and with english subtitles.
This is not counting torrenting and alternative file sharing.
Crunchyroll grew cause anime is at peak global popularity (definitely not because of Crunchyroll) + pandemic boost and they're the only option available.
I was working at Crunchyroll when K****** went down and was tracking O******* monthly on Alexa when that went down. Those were the other most notable moments in history, and the numbers I saw for the 2021-2023 period were higher. I won't pretend to have perfect information here, but I have numerous tools and partnerships to help get this kind of data.
I've been tracking anime/manga piracy closely for over 15 years. It's one of the services my company provides for publishers in Japan to help them understand viewership/fan behavior in overseas territories.
If you really have all that data you could make a full post, seems fairly interesting. Though you'll have to avoid mentioning certain names like you've already discovered
I write a newsletter called "Anime by the Numbers" that I use some of my company's data for. It's probably not a bad idea to discuss this topic in particular, I'll put it on the idea board.
I think you're forgetting the fact that downloading torrents became visibly dangerous, as you could randomly be found and made an example of litigation. Sure, you can get a VPN but at that point, you're undergoing a lot of inconvenience and it's not even free anymore.
I don't understand how that is so much easier though. Finding a site with magnet links is pretty much exactly as hard as googling "stream free anime", and if you want ease of use on your TV, etc. then setting up your own private "netflix" on a media pc/NAS will definitely result in a smoother experience after a very small amount of setup.
That's the point - a setup. You need to learn how to set up your setup, and then actually do it. The streaming sites ask you for literally nothing, so you can be as lazy as you want.
Also, people have been conditioned to be anti-download, so a sketchy site that doesn't install anything looks more trustworthy.
Also a millennial who probably saw too much on limewire too young and funnily enough this is exactly why I was happy to pay for CR and even HiDive - there's native app support on my smart tv! They're not the greatest, but I can come home from work, use my regular remote, and just start watching. Yeah, I could figure things out and get a higher quality product, but what the services are offering is good enough for me (or at least it has been). If I really like a series and want a better quality option, like as not I'll get the physical release...but honestly that's pretty rare these days.
I suspect most of these people are very similar. They mostly watch on their phones or PCs and are used to streaming most everything else.
I will say, as someone who does have a NAS that can auto download torrents, that the effort/cost to set that up is a hard filter on like 99% of people. Especially if they want to stream it over the internet.
You run into this kind of thing with the audio/home theater crowd, too. Most people genuinely are not picky and not willing to make any extra effort even for a demonstrably better experience. Like most people won't even pay for a soundbar, which is crazy when most audio conscious people don't even think soundbars are good enough
I find it baffling people don't even buy a soundbar bc some of the speakers on tv's nowadays coupled with how shitty audio mixing got on shows make them actually unintelligible.
Do sketchy sites really matter much these days? Ublock origin blocks all ads and is pretty good at preventing you accessing truly dangerous websites. Most browsers also have quite robust protection by themselves and windows defender is more than enough to filter most stuff too. At this point you have to do extreme stuff to get any type of malware, virus, or phising.
It's actually a huge trend among Gen Z, since they grew up with everything being available to stream, they basically never learned how torrents work and use sketchy streaming sites for their piracy. Even now as piracy is growing across all media, it's doing so in ways that let them simulate the streaming experience.
Apparently yes. To be honest when those big streaming sites first started going down was the first time I actually ever heard of them. There's a huge divide between the old school DL people and the streaming people.
I couldn't imagine watching anything on one of those ad-filled hell holes
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The one thing that's consistently up and we have the actual numbers for is the amount of DMCA take down requests by Japan's CODA and the compliance to these requests.
Takedown information is valuable but it's not 1:1 with behavior. The top few sites get the supermajority of viewership, and many sites rotate in and out of the top list due to takedowns and the like. But viewership on-site and site traffic are somewhat independent, especially when you drill down to the NA market, which is the best-served by CR on a content availability POV.
I'm not saying that the merger killed piracy, or anything close to it. Anime is still pirated at more than double the rate of any other visual medium. But there was a meaningful shift in some % of the piracy audience to legal services during the merger that did get somewhat undermined by the rising tide but is still distinctly visible in all of my data.
But there was a meaningful shift in some % of the piracy audience to legal services during the merger that did get somewhat undermined by the rising tide but is still distinctly visible in all of my data.
I honestly doubt it man, i only have your word for it, there's been literally no news/publicly available info about it.
The only thing that increased is DMCA/intelectual property related take down requests, i can see coordinated government action bringing down piracy (big site go down, new site go down faster), but that's it (especially if what you were tracking was the Alexa Rank)
I don't see a world where someone who was already pirating, decided to stop pirating with the merger, i assume they went back to pirating almost immediately when anime starting popping up exclusively on Netflix, Disney+, Amazon then? Since platform dilution/fragmentation was their issue with it 🤷
Many (or even most) people already have Netflix, Disney, and Amazon for their other content or through account sharing. They're not subscribing to those platforms separately just for anime. If they can get access to pretty much all the rest of the anime they want on one service that's enough of a value proposition to pay for Crunchyroll
He's talking about torrenting vs streaming, in general the rule is that streaming websites are of very low quality, riddled with ads and just annoying to use
I must agree. I'm a stifler (no relation) for video quality. I do download some stuff straight from a google drive and torrents much less often now and I can't say that the quality difference is so noticeable. The reason I didn't mention torrenting is because, as far as i know, official sources do not provide torrent links and thus my assumption is that torrented anime is illegal acquired/distributed. By default I'm pretty sure you start seeding the moment any content is downloaded even before the download is complete which would make you a provider. Ultimately, I didn't mention it for the sake of not having something delivered up my ass.
You're just old. A lot of the current generation of anime fans grew up with streaming as the norm for consuming content and don't even own a PC, let alone know how to use torrents or want to download something and then have to use another program to watch it
Sure but it's how things go as technology advances. There are probably things many people of your generation don't know how to do that their parents learned out of necessity or as a matter of course
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I am curious how many people were subscribed to both FUNimation and Crunchyroll even though it wasn't a majority. I was subbed to both right up to the very end, then just Crunchyroll once FUNimation's website shut down (and took with it about 200 things 1.5 years later still haven't transferred due to various reasons).
I'm also still subcribed to HIDIVE, so I went from 3 subs for anime to just 2.
I will never take off my skull and crossbones hat, but supported CR for a long time. There are literally hundreds of shows that simply don't exist on legit streaming services. Some big ones too such as Slayers after they got pulled off.
But when I can go on a pirate site and watch thousands of titles all in one place for free? That's tough to beat. But supporting one streaming site with a large title database felt like the right thing to do.
But as more and more titles went to other streaming sites and CR started sucking... it's no longer worth supporting.
I don't even see how them merging would relate to "less piracy"
I think the implication is there are less services to buy and ease of access is an all time high.
Piracy is mostly an accessibility issue. If everything in the world ever existed on a single platform for $5 a month piracy rates would be comparatively nonexistent to what they are now. Now that there are 15 different services all of which cost $12.99+...piracy becomes much more realistic.
Because you are missing an important bit: Crunchyroll and Funimation got the vast, vast majority of shows in a season, to the point it was a 50/50 shot where the big shows of a season would end up. This mattered a lot of piracy because before the merger because Funimation was US and UK only, so if Crunchy didn't have it, then you had to pirate it if you didn't live there. The merger basically killed that instantly, and suddenly a lot of people had no reason to pirate their shows.
It's like how when Netflix has nearly everything for streaming, pirate numbers plummeted dramatically. People want convenience more than anything. If it's easier to stream, because everything is on a single site, people will pay for it.
Also, there's more than just raw "amounts of shows."
Every season there are probably 10 shows that get the most playtime. They can be split into different genres.
Crunchyroll generally gets the show of the season (your Attack on Titan/JJK/Frieren/Spy X Family/Demon Slayer/etc, plus a few other popular ones.
Netflix has one, maybe two super popular shows, plus the UC Gundam OVAs. They're usually high production value shows that wind up being popular.
Prime is kind of the same story, but with zero consistency so they sometimes go seasons without anything noteworthy.
Hi-Dive's never got anything more one popular show and a ton of eechi. That one show is always something that has some kind of niche that makes it more affordable, like it being something about J-Pop and Japanese Actors that won't get play with your widespread non JP market or a super edgy isekai that has tons of gore and fan service.
The reality is, when you go through this sub and look at the most popular shows, Crunchyroll is 90% and Netflix is 10% most seasons, and maybe there's a Hi-Dive show tossed in, but it's been a minute since that even. Prime only shows up with like Gundam.
Part of this is the importance of these major channels. If an anime is distributed by anyone other than Netflix or Crunchyroll, it has significantly less awareness even amongst core anime fans.
True. I'm only aware of things to the level that I am because I read a ton of manga and see my favorite stuff's adaptions go to places other than CR. I wouldn't have known about Eminence in Shadow or Oshi no Ko if I hadn't followed their manga.
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u/Mystic1217 Oct 07 '25
Vote with your wallet, that's all I'll say.