Outside of Asia, Crunchyroll is a de-facto monopoly on legal anime. From the article, 70% of new releases are exclusive to Crunchyroll. They're not losing customers to platforms with better subs, because customers have no alternative.
(Besides pirating, but I assume the golden age of Tier 1 fan subs is over)
That's just because the legal options were easily available, right? Kind of like people stopped pirating as much when Netflix was actually decent. But now the tides are turning again, so maybe the fan subs will start coming back as well.
Still, though, I wonder if that mindset is still going to be around.
I remember seeing (I think Netflix release) of Komi-san can't communicate, noticing A lot of things being missed, like Komi's literal main manner of communication (A notebook where she writes) not getting any translation for some episodes, or a lot of things I'd have to fill others in that normally at least would have been a T/N in fansub
It was bad enough that I went looking elsewhere to see if I had missed more than I realized, and the fansub did have everything covered
Here's the answer right here...
* Shonen anime, which are consistently the most popular ones, are also on netflix and probably several other services. Eg, demon slayer, dandadan, etc.
* there are still shows that are japan-exclusive because nobody bothers to license them. Roboshinkalion is an entire franchise that nobody cares to import! We actually had to wait two extra years for gridman universe because nobody bothered to license it for English localization!
* just this year they failed to obtain the rights to Mobile Suit Gundam G-Quuuuuux and Panty and Stocking With Garterbelt because amazon outbid them. These are both new entries in well-established brands and they're both made by studios with large fan followings (khara for g-quuuuuux and trigger for panty and stocking).
* somehow Hulu ended up breaking harmony gold's 45-year blockade around the macross franchise and won exclusive streaming rights.
* netflix has a lot of exclusives these days, including Jojo stone ocean and the upcoming steelball run.
$100k per month is extra revenue, if they do a half-assed job. A customer actually has no competitor to move to - crunchyroll has a defacto monopoly (barring piracy).
The price of the subscription is already adjusted to be the maximum of what the market would bear for maximum revenue - presumably raising that price higher would lead to lower subscribers and revenue.
That’s the key right there.
When fansubs were good, Crunchyroll was forced to compete with them on quality. It's hard to convince people to pay when the alternative is both free and much higher quality.
Now that they've driven fansubs groups "out of business", they no longer face the same degree of competitive pressure to deliver a quality product.
They have 17 million paying subscribers. If they subtitled 1,000 episodes of content a month * 200$ = 200k / 17 million ~= 1 cent per subscriber per month. Actual cost per subscriber is well below that.
They should probably consider that this competitor is actually mpv playing the DRM-free blu-ray quality fully subtitled mkv files obtained for a grand total of zero dollars from organized groups of people who simply care about anime to an absurd degree.
"Paying customer" is a synonym for "fool" in this context. Paying for inferior products is just foolish. It is damaging to one's self-respect. It is even more damaging for the reputation of the corporation. A bunch of fans regularly put them to shame by releasing better products on a daily basis. That's just pathetic.
But still, I often find myself watching anime from fansub groups even though I have a legitimate, official way of watching them. Paying for a streaming service that is objectively, significantly worse than even the shittier pirate offerings does make me feel like a fool.