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Comment by HALtheWise | Hacker News Reader

Anime is a $25B industry in terms of revenue, but that doesn't actually imply anything in particular about whether there's any profit in it. I see people make this sort of mistake all the time, and it bugs me. In this particular case, I think the appropriate reaction is very different if the anime industry is wildly profitable vs losing money as a whole, but the article is happy to throw revenue numbers around in the headline without engaging with that distinction.

< /rant>

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Actual facts instead of unsourced opinion: plenty of profit is being made - by the distributors.

https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/t5illb/comment/hz57d...

Also, you seem to be terribly confused by "the company is not making much profit on paper" and "the people in management and running the company are paid plenty." You think management is paid as lowly as the animators?

This is no different from hollywood where studio management make plenty of money and the army of people actually doing the lion's share of the work, especially GFX/SFX, are poorly paid, and accountants make it look like the film barely breaks even.

If your industry is making $25B and there's no profit, your industry is not very efficient. I've been part of working with licensed content, so not actually in the production side from actually animating. However, just from the interaction with them in that manner, you can tell they are not working in anything that would make you think they are doing things efficiently at all. It only seems that would percolate through out that side of things

That’s just not true. There are many industry that runs efficient but generate little profit. In general, the more competition, the less profit. Warren Buffett sold the airline business for this reason. Many businesses are simply too hard.

From the perspective of society the purpose of an industry is to produce something valuable (anime). Whether that industry makes a lot of profit for the investors doesn't really matter, and generally that profit tends to become lower the more competition there is.

An industry does not need to make profit at all. The only people who care about profit are the investors in that industry (the shareholders). Everyone working in the industry, from the bottom rungs to the top execs get paid compensation which is deducted as a cost.

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