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Comment by chii | Hacker News Reader

i think you've counted it in a way that makes it sound cheap, but in reality isnt.

$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.

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>A customer actually has no competitor to move to - crunchyroll has a defacto monopoly (barring piracy).

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.

My recollection is that, by the early days of Crunchyroll, fansubs weren't really competing on quality so much as speed. And with the legitimate licensors having access to the scripts slightly in advance of the Japanese release, the fansubs could never catch up to them in release speed.

In the very early days they were a piracy site that hosted fansubs.

> barring privacy

That’s the key right there.

The ironic part is that a large majority of the piracy is just crunchy roll rips or subtitles from crunchy roll.

Also worth remembering that CR itself started as a pirate site.

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