A weekly look into American otaku culture

Thanks to Satoshi for bringing this article to my attention. According to this report from Wired Magizine, the illegal practice of fansubbing and downloading anime off of the internet can be a beneficial thing to the market.

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As noted by Japanese entrepreneur Joi Ito, fans of the Japanese anime series Naruto regularly post translated episodes of the show to BitTorrent, which attracts more fans to the series.

With box sets and special edition DVDs, Ito wrote, the copyright holders can make a tidy sum from fans prepared to “spend thousands of dollars on one show.”
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Whoa, whoa, whoa… now hold on here. I think that someone is misinterpreting something here. They’re saying that Naruto is going to become a huge success in terms of DVD and box set sales BECAUSE of it’s popularity in fansubbing? Someone is in for a rude awakening…

I’ll put it very bluntly right now: how many people who download the Naruto fansub will buy the DVDs when they come out? I predict that number to be less then 1%, with the rest of the 99% will spend their time bitching about how much it sucks on DVD.

Make no mistakes about it, fansubs are killing the anime market for the US. If you don’t believe me, think about just how many anime DVDs have you purchased recently compared to the number of shows you’ve downloaded for free. I for one will admit I haven’t bought any of the shows I’ve watched fansubbed yet. Now I would like to think that the reason for this is because none of them have been released yet, and when DearS and Girls Bravo come out this summer I’m going to buy them. But since that hasn’t happened yet, I can’t really claim I will really do so. Sometimes I begin to doubt that I will.

But I do know that one thing’s for sure, I see a lot of people still fansubbing and downloading series that have been licensed in the US, and it pisses me off like you wouldn’t believe. Now how can you justify that as being any better then people selling bootlegs on street corners? What a blatant disrespect to the artists and people working so hard to entertain you people.

Now let’s take a look at Naruto, the most popular anime buzz on the internet at the moment. There’s no doubt that people are loving it. When I attended Anime Boston this year, most of the cosplayers were from the series. I’m sure that these guys have watched all the episodes, but just how much money did those “fans” contribute to the people who made the series? A plushie or two? Sure, the anime series is not yet available in the US, but the manga has been out for some time. However, if you look at the sales in that market, Naruto isn’t even close to doing well! The fansub community doesn’t even support that market either.

However, what Mr. Ito said in the article was correct that the show is bound to be a huge success in the US. It has the kind of appeal that makes it so popular to a mass market. This is evident in Japan and the fansub community. So when the series is released to mainstream America, odds are that it will be a hit even with the non-anime fans. It will thrive on the television, action figure, and video game market, much like Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon did in the past. You will also a small portion of those fans picking up a volume of the manga and discovering how cool it is to read from right-to-left. And so they’ll buy the next one volume, and the one after that, and then they’ll try out some other series. That’s the next generation of anime fandom right there people!

And what will the fansub community think about Naruto then?

“It’s too mainstream. I don’t like it.”

So don’t keep up the denial that fansubs are good for the industry. Naruto is probably going to be very popular and will help the industry grow. But it’s going to do so by “selling out” and bringing in fans willing to watch shows on TV and buy DVDs. Unless the fansub community actually goes out there and support the series in these ways, then we’re doing nothing more then leeching off of the people that bring them the entertainment we love.

(Follow-up Post)