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Kaelik
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Post by Kaelik »

Shrapnel wrote:I don't mind ads. I don't mind Cruncyroll having ads. It's the way they actually go about doing the ads that I don't like! Three blocks of three commercials totalling nine minutes per episode is just not how civilized men do things.
Again if by civilized you mean "People don't have any expenses besides hosting, since they literally steal the stuff" then sure. That's true.

But if by civilized you mean "company that makes money through ads legally" it definitely is. Because Crunchyroll is... the only company doing that. (Also funimation.)
Last edited by Kaelik on Tue Jan 03, 2017 11:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.
DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?
The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.

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Post by Hiram McDaniels »

Shrapnel wrote: This. This this this this this this. This is EXACTLY what I'm saying.

I don't mind ads. I don't mind Cruncyroll having ads. It's the way they actually go about doing the ads that I don't like! Three blocks of three commercials totalling nine minutes per episode is just not how civilized men do things.
Yeah but they make a good point about pirating. I'll buy a subscription to funimation or something, even though I'm using kissanime.
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Post by Mechalich »

The problem is Crunchyroll is not making money through ads legally. It's making money via it's subscription service, in the same way that The Anime Network, Daiksuki, and the various licensors who partner through Hulu, Netflix, or Amazon are doing. The in-stream ads Crunchyroll offers are a dodge, they aren't a major part of the revenue stream (which is why you see the same companies over and over again), and the ads are designed to be sufficiently annoying so that people switch over to the subscription service in the same way that the 1-week delay is. The free service is primarily a bait-and-switch campaign.

That being said, it is still better to use Crunchyroll and support the official licenses while using adblockers to block their ads. The traffic data helps show interest in anime in the US and is beneficial to the industry, and click-throughs to non-instream ads. Using 3rd-party illegal streaming sites (or watching unofficial streams on YouTube) provides revenue to content thieves. Objecting to Crunchyroll's largely false ad-based premise is one thing, giving money to rippers is quite another.
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Post by Whipstitch »

New Japan Pro Wrestling had their Tokyo dome show. It was cool but there was also a top rope dragon suplex. Top rope dragon suplexes are a bad idea.
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Post by Voss »

Mechalich wrote:The problem is Crunchyroll is not making money through ads legally.
You seem confused. There isn't anything illegal about running ads, whether on TV or on streams. That many people would rather pay a sub fee rather than watch ads is up to them, but there isn't anything exploitative or dickish about running ads similar to network TV advertising alongside free (and legal) content.
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Post by Omegonthesane »

Voss wrote:
Mechalich wrote:The problem is Crunchyroll is not making money through ads legally.
You seem confused. There isn't anything illegal about running ads, whether on TV or on streams. That many people would rather pay a sub fee rather than watch ads is up to them, but there isn't anything exploitative or dickish about running ads similar to network TV advertising alongside free (and legal) content.
...Literally the following sentence after what you quoted.

The thing is, Crunchyroll has ads designed to piss you off so that you subscribe or beat it. It doesn't have ads designed to make money. Its income source is almost solely sub fees.
Last edited by Omegonthesane on Fri Jan 06, 2017 12:27 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Voss »

Omegonthesane wrote:
Voss wrote:
Mechalich wrote:The problem is Crunchyroll is not making money through ads legally.
You seem confused. There isn't anything illegal about running ads, whether on TV or on streams. That many people would rather pay a sub fee rather than watch ads is up to them, but there isn't anything exploitative or dickish about running ads similar to network TV advertising alongside free (and legal) content.
...Literally the following sentence after what you quoted.
What, that he's trivially inconvenienced? I don't give a shit. The key word in that sentence was legally, which doesn't have the value of 'mechalich doesn't like it.' Or, indeed, 'the majority of their income comes from subs.' Selling subs and running ads to people who don't pay anything at all isn't an evil business model, even if for some random reason you want to argue its ethically dubious, it still isn't illegal, which I'll remind you again is the claim.
The thing is, Crunchyroll has ads designed to piss you off so that you subscribe or beat it.
Or you can just let them play. It isn't a big deal. It certainly isn't a justification for pirating shit.
Last edited by Voss on Fri Jan 06, 2017 12:55 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

I'll tell you what though.

Last season of Anime Crunchy roll had a lot of current releases. And they were all total shit.

Turns out there WAS one anime that season I found interesting enough to watch the full season. But it WAS NOT on Crunchyroll (or wasn't on Crunchyroll in my region along with EVERYTHING they add that isn't a current simulcast) nor was it on anything else I either subscribe to, or normally visit legally for free, so my subscription was wasted and I'm very tempted to discontinue.

When the only paid options you are offered don't offer the service you are looking for Piracy doesn't have to be right it just has to be the best available option for providing the service that is lacking.
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Kaelik
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Post by Kaelik »

I call bullshit. PL has never liked anything ever. You can't possibly expect me to believe that PL liked a 2016 Fall anime.
DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?
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Post by DSMatticus »

I have complicated opinions on piracy and adblock, which is probably fair, because they're complicated topics.

Advertising is a weird example of the tragedy of the commons. As a content provider, there are advertisers who want to pay you money to host aggressive and malicious ads (or maybe you just don't want to put in the resources needed to maintain respectable standards). As a content consumer, you have no (or at least very limited) ability to vet individual advertisers, and are subject to - with neither consent nor forewarning - whatever kind of ads you happen to stumble across. So when malware makes its way onto the Youtube ad platform (and it does), that puts pressure on consumers to install adblock and never look at another fucking ad because holy shit Youtube just tried to hand your computer over to a Russian botnet. And obviously when consumers actually install adblock suddenly the ad revenue starts drying up and websites either need to adopt even shittier ads or abandon the advertising-based model entirely. It's a tragedy of the commons; the bullshit the audience is willing to put up with is a shared resource, and when you individually overtap that resource everyone in the shares the costs of your misbehavior.

"Annoying ads as an incentive to subscribe" is a perfect example of this. Crunchyroll is deliberately trying to burn through the consumer's patience with advertising so that the consumer will pay them to not see ads. That's beyond tragedy of the commons. That is literally setting fire to the commons so you can rent your backyard to people for grazing. It's actually obscenely unethical and extraordinarily harmful to the future of advertising-based business models. But it's very good for crunchyroll, who get increased exposure as a free service and will convert some of those free users into subscribers.

As for piracy... well, the fact is you live in a world of massive entertainment monopolies. Obviously every traditional cable company is one, but even the era of digital services is full of assholes; take Amazon and ebooks, for example. Amazon is absolutely fucking horrible to publishers and authors, and they get away with it because their market share is so large you can either sign on with Amazon or get fucked. Obviously, authors deserve money for writing something people want to read. Obviously, Amazon deserves money for providing a platform by which you can access those authors' works. But Amazon does not deserve money "because we're bigger than you fuck you that's why." But in most cases there's really no way around it; you can either steal it or you can pay the monopoly fees. Stealing shit is bad, yes, but so is helping prop up wildly abusive monopolies.
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Post by Mechalich »

Voss wrote:
Mechalich wrote:The problem is Crunchyroll is not making money through ads legally.
You seem confused. There isn't anything illegal about running ads, whether on TV or on streams. That many people would rather pay a sub fee rather than watch ads is up to them, but there isn't anything exploitative or dickish about running ads similar to network TV advertising alongside free (and legal) content.
I was quoting Kaelik, okay, and I left out the quote symbols. My bad. Yes there's nothing illegal about running ads, that's not really the point.

The point is that the service Crunchyroll purports to offer: free streaming of anime episodes supported by ad revenue, is not the service Crunchyroll actually offers, which is paid subscription-based streaming of anime episodes. Crunchyroll, like Hulu, is engaged in a protracted campaign to build a sufficiently large subscriber base at which point it is quite likely to eliminate its free service entirely, just like Hulu did.

From the time several years ago when anime streaming of simulcasts became a thing (which the industry fought for years and only finally accepted because it got obliterated by piracy) more and more content has been disappearing behind subscription paywalls. The Anime Network used to have a lot more free content than it does now. Hulu used to host anime for free (a lot of which was Funimation stuff which has since moved to Crunchyroll but there's a bunch of other stuff by smaller license holders that was lost). Netflix is pulling more and more shows over themselves that never become available for streaming for free. Free streaming is being gradually strangled and Crunchyroll is part of that. It is not a benevolent actor in this process. It is better than most of the others, but it's still part of a gradual movement towards subscription-based everything.

Subscription based models are not a good thing for anime. For one, they lead to pandering towards the taste of the segment of wealthy, highly devoted fans who are willing to buy a subscription. Actually, to the truly obsessive fans who are willing to buy multiple subscriptions, since the industry has no plans to unify to a single content host and as Japanese companies act more and more as their own US licensors is likely to split further. That's already happened in Japan and it has seriously limited the quality of production and the types of shows that get made. Anime made from 2005-2015 was much less experimental, risk-taking, and quality-controlled than anime from 1995-2005. Example: the skyrocketing number of cookie-cutter magical academy shows.

Subscription based models also isolate the fanbase. They make it more difficult for younger fans without money to get into the hobby without going the pirate route. That's bad because people who start via piracy are likely to stick with piracy (especially if piracy is the most convenient means to acquire the content, which it still is) and never pay the companies jack. This is particularly important as digital file quality increases, which reduces the incentive to buy actual DVDs or BRs (I have anime from the early 2000s that I own on DVD which would look better as torrents I could find in 5 minutes, which is probably less time than it would take for me to track down the disks, pull them out, and pick whichever episode I felt a sudden inclination to re-watch).

Ultimately anime is a broadcast medium. 90% of episodes of all series ever will be watched by 90% of viewers a single time. I've personally watched ~50 series worth of anime in the past 3 years, the number of those series that I've re-watched at all is a big fat 1: Knights of Sidonia. Successfully monetizing the broadcast viewing experience is essential for the long term health of anime as a whole (and ultimately, for scripted TV period as the cord-cutting era continues to march on) and right now everything is going in the wrong direction.


Note that none of the above changes the fact that piracy is bad. It is, and anime is an industry that has been really and truly hurt by it. The industry deserves support, and you should definitely watch interesting anime on whichever subscription service you have that way rather than pirating it. Also, using Crunchyroll is still something that is worth doing (again the ads aren't a real part of the revenue stream so ad-block them if you want), especially for older series, in order to show interest in them. Also clicking through Crunchyroll's banner ads and emails to go to merchandise sites is helpful and supports the good kind of ads and is worth doing if you buy that kind of stuff.

EDIT: kinda ninja'd by DSMatticus, but I think the points are actually complementary.
Last edited by Mechalich on Fri Jan 06, 2017 2:49 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Kaelik »

I like how you guys just decided by mind reading that the increased add time and number relative to youtube is evidence that crunchyroll adds are not making any real money, so it's totally fine to block them.

I mean, you can make the decision to block them if you want, but what you are actually doing is deluding yourselves to justify your decision because that makes you feel better. If you don't have the balls to block adds that are in fact part of the revenue stream, then don't do it.
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Post by Mechalich »

Kaelik wrote:I like how you guys just decided by mind reading that the increased add time and number relative to youtube is evidence that crunchyroll adds are not making any real money, so it's totally fine to block them.
It's not just 'mind reading' there's actual evidence than can be extracted from how the ads play.

First, gradually increasing the length and frequency of ads is exactly the path Hulu took as they made their gradual transition to a subscription only service, so there's that.

Second, and more importantly, there's the sameness of the ads. The Crunchyroll ad experience involves seeing the same exact ads, for the same very small number of companies, over and over again. That is indicative of a non-competitive ad-base, which means that the site is not interested in pursuing pertinent companies or making the pitch that their ads are useful. I recall at one point watching an entire series from the Crunchyroll archives with the ads, I saw nothing but the same AT&T ad over and over back-to-back-to-back at every single break episode after episode. That's not even close to a function ad base.

Finally, and most obviously of all, if they were really committed to making money through a broadcast ad-based model, they'd hack off the one-week delay that they impose on everyone who doesn't pay for a subscription. That's way more annoying than any ads since it makes it impossible for non-subscribers to follow the conversation surrounding a new hit without turning to piracy. That one-week delay induces far more piracy than the ads do (since the Crunchyroll release gets ripped within minutes of going up) but is the absolute cornerstone of the subscription model.
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Post by Kaelik »

While your claim that "they are totally going to switch to subscription only just any day now, just soon, tomorrow, and the day after, Trump will support an investigation of Russian influence on the election." is not disprovable for obvious reasons, that's not what I was talking about.

It doesn't matter if they are totally going to do something different soon that will give them no more ad revenue. You have no evidence right now that their ads aren't producing significant revenue.
DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?
The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.

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Post by DSMatticus »

Well, they obviously make some nonzero amount of money off them. Crunchyroll doesn't put them on there for free. But the fact is that both the length and the lack of variety are strongly indicative of a weak ad base and that means an absolutely piss poor revenue stream. Generally speaking smaller adverts cost more per unit air time and everyone involved is okay with that because the conventional wisdom is that smaller adverts are also more effective at brand recall per unit air time. The ideal advertising environment - for both the people providing the ad slots and the people filling them - is full of 15s and 30s spots with a smattering of 45s and 60s.

"The same minute long advertisement played three times in a single ad break" is not an atypical Crunchyroll experience, and that's pretty much all the evidence you need to understand that that shit's fucked beyond all belief. There's also 120s+ ads, which is a whole lot of "what the shit." I have absolutely no doubt for Crunchyroll that the primary utility of their advertising is to be able to draw in consumers as a free platform and then annoy the shit out of those consumers until they subscribe. Otherwise, it simplys makes no economical sense. There's a reason other websites don't do advertising the way Crunchyroll does, and it's not "Crunchyroll found the magical recipe for success and everyone else is an idiot." That there are a small number of businesses which will pay them to annoy their users is just an added bonus.
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Post by Mechalich »

BY the way, in terms of evidence. Here's an article that explains how Crunchyroll earns chump change from ads and almost all its money from paid subscriptions. It's a bit dated, but there's nothing to suggest the core relationship has changed. Key figures include the fact that a single subscriber's 7 bucks is roughly equivalent to the ad revenue produced by 1,000 ad views.

So if a single episode contained 10 ads (not unreasonable if they were short) you'd have to watch 100 episodes or close to four full seasons to provide in ad revenue what a subscription provides and you'd have to do that each month.

Since even fairly heavy viewers are probably only watching 10-20 episodes a month (that'd be following 2-4 simulcasts consistently and dipping into the back catalog from time to time) and most are streaming a lot less than that the overall ad revenue is a pittance.

Alternate way to think about it: the amount of ad revenue you'd generate from sitting through the entirety of Naruto and Bleach is less than a year's subscription would produce.
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Post by Kaelik »

Wow Mechalich, you keep proving something only tangentially related to your claim over and over.
DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?
The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.

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Post by Sigil »

The point of the advertisements is to provide a tangible incentive for people to subscribe, in order to not get ads, while also generating at least some income off of users who will never subscribe, which is better than nothing. They do the same thing with restricting higher quality video to paying subs. You could argue that the presence of ads (and other incentives) actually earns them the majority of their revenue, even if it does so indirectly, and that without them Crunchyroll wouldn't be able to survive as a business. And without Crunchyroll your pirate sites wouldn't have the majority of the content they stole (sure, you'd still have fansubs and rips from other sources, but the breadth of content available to you would be much reduced).

Those of you claiming that Crunchyroll having ads is somehow unethical or otherwise a Bad Thing are idiots of colossal proportions who want to justify their own behavior. The hilarious thing is you feel the need to bring up that behavior to other people. No one would shit on you if you just watched pirated anime and didn't fucking tell people about it, they wouldn't even know who you were to shit on you if they wanted to. During times of my life where I was fucking broke and couldn't afford entertainment I've done the same thing, and pirated video games, and pirated fucking commercial software too. Point is I didn't go fucking blabbing about it because it isn't something to be proud of. Now that I have disposable income I don't do that shit, and if you have disposable income you probably shouldn't either.
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Post by DSMatticus »

Sigil wrote:Those of you claiming that Crunchyroll having ads is somehow unethical or otherwise a Bad Thing are idiots of colossal proportions who want to justify their own behavior.
Learn to fucking read or learn when to keep your mouth shut. One of those will be an incredibly valuable skill for you. The argument is not that ads are bad. You will find exactly zero people who said that in this thread; even Shrapnel had the sense to bitch specifically about how crazy annoying these specific ads are. The argument you will find is that deliberately excessive ads as a "tangible incentive for people to subscribe" (your words, not mine) are bad. They are bad because you live in a world where adblock, anti-anti-adblock, and piracy all exist, and because any method which attempts to monetize consumers through annoyance will drive some significant number of users to pursue non-monetizable means of consuming content generally.

This is a real thing that really happens. It's a problem economies have to tackle. And if there is one person - one single person on the planet - who said "man, fuck crunchyroll. I'm installing adblock," then Crunchyroll has in fact helped deplete a shared resource. That is a Bad Thing. When done deliberately and to excess (to a certain extent it's unavoidable, some people are going to use adblock everywhere no matter what), it is absolutely unethical. The fact is that the future of advertising-based entertainment depends on people being willing to tolerate advertisments because spoiler; technology and piracy win. You are not going to 'force' people into the proper channels. And if you are a disproportionate contributor to the adoption of adblock then you are absolutely part of the problem. Because again, shared resource, and you are burning the fuck through it like you're some kind of Clive Bundy.

It's a complicated topic and I did not fail to express that; you and your simplistic strawman can spend the evening sharing a barrel of cocks.
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Post by Mechalich »

And the ultimate consequence of the tragedy of the commons for something like broadcast anime is that it gets removed from the commons. In this case that means it gets stuck behind subscription paywalls.

That is a thing that is happening. While Crunchyroll has so far resisted that, more and more anime content that is not on Crunchyroll, which is an ever increasing amount of content, is stuck behind paywalls, or not even available for streaming at all.

And, while Crunchyroll's subscription fee isn't that much, it won't get you all the anime you want, because Crunchyroll doesn't have anything resembling an monopoly. Anime streaming is divided up so that Crunchyroll gets some shows, Hulu gets some shows, and Netflix gets some, and Amazon Prime gets some, and the Anime Network gets some, and sometimes they go direct to limited edition DVD (extremely common for anime films). So unless you're prepared to juggle between four or more different subscription services from season to season to get the shows you want, you're going to get hosed.

Now, it is entirely possible that providing anime on an advertising-based model in the United States at a profit is not possible to do. Many lower-tier shows apparently can't even hit five figures when it comes to simulcast streaming numbers, and the number that manage to hit six figures is quite possibly limited to a tiny handful of major shounen properties like Naruto. However, it is difficult to square that with the ongoing rampant competition to grab up series by big time streaming players like Netflix and Amazon. Maybe there's a huge divide in the draw between top-shelf series and the bargain shows (certainly possible, though as much as I think Ajin is a good thriller I wouldn't classify it as a big draw and yet Netflix has gone in for two seasons). It's impossible to know without detailed economic data, but considering that paywall blockage is used in other media forms as a way to screw the consumer it's hard to give the industry the benefit of the doubt.
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Post by Sigil »

That's a bad fucking argument. There is no number or quality of advertisements that wont, in your words, cause "one single person on the planet" to decide they can't be fucked and to pirate or stream from parties who pirate instead. It's entirely subjective and there's always going to be someone willing to operate in bad faith.

Additionally, do you think Crunchyroll actually intends to alienate customers? You can only serve ads that that people have paid to serve, in order to get better and more diverse ads the user base has to grow so that your service is more attractive to advertisers. Unfortunately, anime is a relatively niche product in the US, so you're sort of stuck with what you can get. Additionally, they can't give it away for free, because then the service can't continue to operate. The entire system requires Crunchyroll to trust their users, and for the users (at least most of them) to operate in good faith. If this is a situation where tragedy of the commons applies, then the people blocking ads and pirating fill the role of the fuckwits acting against the long term best interest of the group, and should stop. "Access to anime" isn't some sort of right, its a product that has to be sold to exist at all.

Edit: Post wasn't constructed as a rebuttal to Mechalich, who posted between the time that I opened a new post tab and actually got around to posting.
Last edited by Sigil on Sat Jan 07, 2017 12:57 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Kaelik »

Mechalich wrote:And, while Crunchyroll's subscription fee isn't that much, it won't get you all the anime you want, because Crunchyroll doesn't have anything resembling an monopoly. Anime streaming is divided up so that Crunchyroll gets some shows, Hulu gets some shows, and Netflix gets some, and Amazon Prime gets some, and the Anime Network gets some, and sometimes they go direct to limited edition DVD (extremely common for anime films). So unless you're prepared to juggle between four or more different subscription services from season to season to get the shows you want, you're going to get hosed.
So far amazon prime has had one exclusive show ever. Likewise, Hulu. Netflix has had two, and they are both garbage. (And it's not like Hulu's is actually good.)

For fuck's sake you are so out of touch with reality, you are complaining about a thing that literally isn't an issue for any person in the world, and aren't even aware of what limited evidence there is for your argument:

IE, it used to be that Funimation had lots of shows that weren't on crunchyroll, so their was a legitimate need to visit both sights that streamed anime for free. Or Daiski.net which at least had an exclusive that was actually good and people actually watched (though of course, watching it is free).
DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?
The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.

That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
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Post by DSMatticus »

Sigil wrote:That's a bad fucking argument. There is no number or quality of advertisements that wont, in your words, cause "one single person on the planet" to decide they can't be fucked and to pirate or stream from parties who pirate instead. It's entirely subjective and there's always going to be someone willing to operate in bad faith.
DSMatticus wrote:When done deliberately and to excess (to a certain extent it's unavoidable, some people are going to use adblock everywhere no matter what), it is absolutely unethical. The fact is that the future of advertising-based entertainment depends on people being willing to tolerate advertisments because spoiler; technology and piracy win. You are not going to 'force' people into the proper channels. And if you are a disproportionate contributor to the adoption of adblock then you are absolutely part of the problem. Because again, shared resource, and you are burning the fuck through it like you're some kind of Clive Bundy.
Shut up you strawmanning fuckface. Shut up.

The shit you are bitching about is in my posts. It has always been in my posts. Read them or stop fucking talking to me like anyone is supposed to give a shit about your "rebuttals."
Sigil wrote:Additionally, do you think Crunchyroll actually intends to alienate customers? You can only serve ads that that people have paid to serve, in order to get better and more diverse ads the user base has to grow so that your service is more attractive to advertisers.
No, I think know, because it's fucking obvious, that subscribers are substantially more profitable than viewers, and that Crunchyroll - being a fucking business - is perfectly willing to alienate some number of viewers greater than one in order to generate a single subscription, because that will make money. And that shows very fucking obviously in their business model, because their advertising platform is the sort of thing you would see on an imploding website, except Crunchyroll isn't in the middle of imploding.
Sigil wrote: If this is a situation where tragedy of the commons applies, then the people blocking ads and pirating fill the role of the fuckwits acting against the long term best interest of the group, and should stop.
No, that's actually just the free rider problem, of which I guess you could consider the tragedy of the commons a subset? But anime is not a limited resource people "consume" and as such can deplete. It's an information good, and as such can be trivially duplicated and 'acquired' without the rightholder's consent, which shifts the burden of supporting the rightholder from the audience to the subset of the audience that actually pays. But if there is one thing that the digital era has taught you it should be that cracking down on piracy works about as well as cracking down on abortion, and if you really want a healthy digital goods environment that will come down entirely to the business practices of the firms involved, because that's the only lever that can be practically manipulated.
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Post by Mechalich »

DSMatticus wrote:No, that's actually just the free rider problem, of which I guess you could consider the tragedy of the commons a subset? But anime is not a limited resource people "consume" and as such can deplete. It's an information good, and as such can be trivially duplicated and 'acquired' without the rightholder's consent, which shifts the burden of supporting the rightholder from the audience to the subset of the audience that actually pays. But if there is one thing that the digital era has taught you it should be that cracking down on piracy works about as well as cracking down on abortion, and if you really want a healthy digital goods environment that will come down entirely to the business practices of the firms involved, because that's the only lever that can be practically manipulated.
Quite. Worth noting that Crunchyroll exists at all because piracy won. It obliterated an industry that was focused on DVD sales both in the US and in Japan (most anime have never been expected to make a lot of money from their broadcast runs, to the point that a significant fraction exist entirely to promote their source material). It was only then that the Japanese anime companies - who were terrified of US simulcasts being brought back to Japan and killing the domestic market - finally caved and allowed streaming to become a thing.

Now it's a matter of reasonable debate whether or not an ad-revenue based model could function viably for something like anime (and in fact, with the exception of sports, is gradually becoming a question for TV as a whole). What is not open to debate is that Crunchyroll is not attempting to offer such a thing, and neither is any other streaming service. Crunchyroll is running a subscription service that offers 'free' material as an inducement to get people to subscribe.

Crunchyroll's ad-experience is infuriating. Watching the same exact ad, for a product that I have no interest in and isn't related to anime at all, three times in a row, multiple times in a twenty-two minute episode, and not even properly timed to the show breaks (Crunchyroll's ad algorithm will seriously cut to ads with 10 seconds left in the intro song, or five seconds after the mid-episode eye-catch break, which is just fucking embarrassing), is positively miserable. It actually makes watching anime significantly less fun. I'm certain you could do an experiment that compared the ads to just the same amount of dead airtime and people would prefer the dead airtime.

I have the ability to watch Crunchyroll on my TV via my PS4. The ads were so bothersome that my girlfriend refused to let me do that anymore until I hooked my computer up to the TV and ran them that way instead so that adblock could watch the ads. So our judgment was, for the time it took me to buy another HDMI cable (which for a variety of reasons was over a month), that it wasn't worth watching anime at all rather than dealing with Crunchyroll's ad service.

Piracy is messy. Piracy has absolutely, irrefutably inflicted serious harm on the anime industry. But if the best legitimate alternative to piracy available is Crunchyroll's soul-crushingly-bad ad setup, there's a problem. This whole argument got started because people noted that illegal anime ripping sites were offering a much, much less aggravating service than Crunchyroll is. That is actually true. It's partly true because those sites are run illegally and they therefore have lower costs, but it's also partly true because Crunchyroll isn't trying to offer an awesome streaming service, it's trying to get you onto its subscription rolls and its not doing so in good faith.
Last edited by Mechalich on Sat Jan 07, 2017 4:47 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Kaelik
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Post by Kaelik »

It's funny how when you just ignore all the free anime you can watch, you can't watch any streaming anime...

Jesus Mechalich, do you ever get tired of assuming a blatantly untrue statement that has nothing to do with reality and makes you look silly as the basis of all your arguments?
DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?
The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.

That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
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