A tour of Crunchyroll’s office

Uncategorized

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Last week, you guys helped make my post about Crunchyroll one of the most popular Otaku Journalist posts of all time. This week, I wanted to give you more.

It’s a really fortunate coincidence that I’m in San Francisco for work this week. So when Crunchyroll’s CEO, Kun Gao, offered to let me tour Crunchyroll’s San Francisco office, I was able to say yes.

Crunchyroll is located in the Financial District of San Francisco, one of my favorite parts of the city. It’s across the street from the Daiso, a Japanese-style dollar store. It’s a short walk from Minamoto Kitchoan, a bakery where all the sweets are flown in from Japan.

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The first thing I noticed was the brightly-colored wall on the first floor, leading me upstairs. Crunchyroll lives on the building’s two upper floors. The move was recent, earlier this year from a South Beach location, the better to accommodate its now 50-person staff. (There’s also a Tokyo office in Harajuku, but with just three employees.)

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Kun met me in one of the conference rooms, Seele. Each of the rooms’ names is an Evangelion in-joke. The phone rooms are even named Units 01 and 00!

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Here’s one of the workspaces. More than 50 percent of Crunchyroll employees are engineers. If you’re good with computers, Kun said Crunchyroll is always looking to hire more talented, anime-loving engineers. Just email them.

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The office boasts a lounge area with just about every console imaginable. Unfortunately, it’s not really for fun, but to test the Crunchyroll app on various systems.

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Here’s the corner where they used to shoot Crunchyroll TV. They haven’t done it for a while, as you can tell by the messiness. But it does highlight the one most eye-catching parts of the Crunchyroll office—the exorbitant amount of anime merchandise. There are shows, figures, and toys everywhere.

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On the top floor, there’s an outdoor balcony!

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If you look down, you can see the Daiso across the street.

That’s all for now, but that’s not all. Check Otaku Journalist again at 12 AM Pacific Time (3 PM Eastern) for some exciting news about the future of Crunchyroll, which I heard straight from the CEO himself! Update: I got the time a little off, but the post is live!

Sorry to tease. In journalism this is what we call an embargo, where I make a promise not to break news before the company does. But believe me, it’s worth coming back for.

Meet the UK team that turned manga into a career

Careers

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Outside of Japan, heck, even inside of Japan, the road to a career in manga is risky. It’s not enough just to have raw talent.

Manga artist Elena Vitagliano knew that even being the 2011 first place winner of the UK’s premier manga contest, Manga Jiman, wasn’t enough. So she came up with what I think is a pretty ingenious idea: she invited four other artists who’ve won the contest over the years to join a manga collective, Cross#atch.

Need an illustrator, a portrait artist, or a workshop instructor? The idea behind Cross#atch is that you can go to one place and find all of England’s top manga talent there. Hailing from diverse backgrounds—Vitagliano is Italian; her colleagues hail from Portugal, Libya, China, and England—their work is equally impressive but distinct.

Elena reached out to me in September to ask if I’d like to review a copy of Cross#hatch’s debut book, Hatchlings. It’s basically all four of their winning entries (two of the five are collaborators) in one volume, bookended with a cute visual story of the artists’ avatars meeting for the first time. Title pages are in color, chapters are in black-and-white.

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The artistic styles are certainly varied, but each story reveals a common theme of self discovery. But since there aren’t any links to buy the book, that’s not what my review is focusing on. I’m more impressed by how these artists devised a strategy to stand out by teaming up together.

In creative fields it can be especially tough to stand out. But when Elena put her ego aside and invited the people that should be her competition to join her collective, she really increased her chances of success. Even if people who buy a Cross#atch book or attend one of their drawing workshops prefer another artist’s style, for example, that’s still attention that goes toward the collective. And the more people are talking about it, the more likely it is that Elena will find her perfect customers.

I can see this technique working not just for illustrators, but for cosplay accessory creators, photographers, and even indie game designers. More people means more content and variety, which means more clients and buzz. To me, the fact that’d she’d gotten so much top talent to work together was the most interesting part of Elena’s pitch.

Cross#atch can be found on their website and Facebook page. Want to order Hatchlings? Email ink@crosshatchink.com.

Want to pitch me something geeky or anime-oriented to review on my blog for my 10,000 monthly readers? Hit me up.

Otaku Links: Pigeons need love, too

Otaku Links

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  • “Good” news! You can now buy Hatoful Boyfriend, the world’s only pigeon dating sim, legally in English for $1.50. If you haven’t heard, it’s a hilariously homicidal game in which you play as a human girl attending a posh school for birds.
  • It’s almost Halloween and nobody can spell “spooky” correctly. It’s not that Tumblr has turned into a horde of zombies. It’s a meme, of course.
  • Wanted to let you guys know that I now work full time for ReadWrite, which means you can read even more of my reporting on social media, robots, Bitcoins, and the future in general here. It’s been a crazy ride this year going from unemployed to freelance to full time, and I’ll be sure to write about it in more detail soon.

(Screenshot via Hatoful Boyfriend.)

 

The human journalist’s guide to reporting

Journalism

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Last week, my husband’s coworker came back to work for the first time since she was shot. It was, to put it harshly, about one month after everyone stopped caring about the shooting.

As was the case for many people in the DC area, the Navy Yard shooting affected my family deeply. My husband worked in the building where the shooting took place every day for over a year. He was not there on that day, but it didn’t make it any less unnerving. If the shooting had taken place just a month or two earlier, he would surely have been.

For my husband and I, the Navy Yard shooting is still a specter that hangs over our lives. We don’t think of our offices as safe anymore. And yet, our daily fear isn’t going to make any headlines; and hasn’t since September 19. The modern news cycle works like a searchlight, one journalism theory goes, hovering briefly over one event before moving on to the next new thing.

In the backs of our minds, we realize that there are still people to whom previous shootings like Newtown, Aurora, and even Virginia Tech are always going to be front page news, especially if they lost a loved one. As the searchlight of the media moves ceaselessly onward, there are those of us who get left behind.

If I weren’t such a geek, I’d probably call my theory of Otaku Journalism “The Human Being’s Guide to Reporting.” I think humanity is what’s missing in the modern media. There’s always a personal story behind front page news, and I don’t think it’s one that should be discarded after just a day. Because events like Monday’s Nevada school shooting aren’t just about the facts.

Shootings are ordinary now. But not the people involved. John’s coworker is a woman with a story. At her welcome back party, she talked about feeling the presence of God while she was lying there with a gunshot wound. She talked about telling off Joe Biden when he came to visit her in the hospital. Hearing about her passion, anger, and tenacity is riveting.

The searchlight theory of news says that journalists cover events only briefly and superficially because this is what the audience wants. Does anyone really believe that? Just like fiction, journalism is best when it’s about people. Take this great report from The Verge about vaccine deniers, whom I’ve always regarded as a bunch of crazies. This article humanizes them, and made me realize that they’re not malicious people, just terrified for their children’s health.

I also love what journalist Laurie Penny says about the importance of relating to her audience. “One of my least favourite things… is to be told I need to ‘grow a thick skin.’ I’m a writer. A thick skin is literally the last thing I need.”

Just imagine the drop in troll comments that could result from journalists who appeal to their audiences’ humanity. And the synchronous increase in cultural understanding.

There’s always room for empathy in the news.

(Photo by Charles Dharapak, AP.)

Where your Crunchyroll dollars really go: An interview with the CEO

Anime, Journalism

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This month, anime bloggers dragged Crunchyroll’s name through the mud. But CEO Kun Gao couldn’t be more thrilled.

“In no other part of the entertainment business would you find such passionate fans who care so much about supporting the industry,” Gao told me. “I absolutely think their hearts are in the right place.”

I Skyped with Gao this week to chat with him about a viral blog post, Crunchyroll: Is it worth subscribing? The post posits that pirating anime (and then hopefully buying the DVD afterward) would be a better way to support the industry than buying a Crunchyroll membership. But, as the blogger told me on Twitter, they weren’t able to get in touch with Crunchyroll to verify.

I went down the list of assumptions with Gao, and learned quite a few things about Crunchyroll that I never knew before. Here are six of them:

Most of your money goes straight to the industry

Gao couldn’t reveal to me how much of your Crunchyroll payment goes back to anime publishers because of nondisclosure agreements. But he did say that publishers are “ecstatic” about the revenue they receive, and that publishers probably wouldn’t agree to work with Crunchyroll in such large numbers if they were getting such a bad deal.

“This season, we have over 40 simulcasts—more than we’ve ever had. And most of those shows are coming from repeat publishers who’ve been with us from day one. Publishers get the majority of the money [from your subscription] and they’re very happy with what they’re getting.”

The thing is, Crunchyroll makes revenue in a lot of different ways aside from your subscription payment, or ads if you have a free account. That frees up the money you give to Crunchyroll to go right back toward the industry. Basically, hiring more employees and other business costs don’t take away from the portions that anime publishers receive.

You vote with your views

Seventh Style’s blog posts assumes that Crunchyroll splits your subscription payment between all 400+ shows it offers. But the reality is far more interesting than that.

“If you watch just Naruto, your subscription money goes toward supporting that show. If you watch more than one show, the money is split proportionately among those shows depending on which ones you watch the most,” said Gao.

So if you’re watching Kill La Kill 75 percent of the time and Golden Time the other 25 percent, that means Kill La Kill’s publisher gets 75 percent of your money. On Crunchyroll, the more anime you watch, the more publishers you support.

Crunchyroll tries to license everything

Inspired by a Twitter follower, I asked Gao how Crunchyroll picks which shows to license and stream. The answer: whatever they can get.

“Our licensing approach is very straightforward. We make an offer on every single title,” he said.

Of course, it’s not that easy. Crunchyroll has to pay up front and hope it gets the title—for every title it makes an offer on. So if you’re trying to “follow the money” with Crunchyroll’s revenue, this is one of the major places you might end up.

It’s a former fansub site made good

I knew this fact, but I didn’t know the whole story. Gao said that he and his partners started the site in 2006 to be like “YouTube” for Asian TV, and invited fans to upload their favorite shows, minus the license. But a few months later, they traveled to Japan to try and change that.

At first, publishers were reluctant, and didn’t see the value in bringing shows online.

“When we first started, publishers doubted anime viewers would pay online to support the anime industry,” he said. “We showed them that anime fans are decent people willing to support the anime industry directly by subscription or ad support and that piracy is really a last resort for when they really love the content but can’t get it any other way.”

Miraculously, TV Tokyo, the largest anime publisher in the world, accepted Crunchyroll’s offer. Shortly afterward, Crunchyroll went, as Gao said, “from YouTube to Hulu overnight,” streaming only the shows they had licensed and removing everything else.

Fewer than 10 percent of users are subscribers

I wasn’t surprised to hear that the male-female Crunchyroll user split is about 50-50. Or that a bit fewer than 50 percent of users are international, from Latin America, Spain, Portugal and France. But I’ve been a subscriber since 2010, and I had no idea how unusual that was.

Out of Crunchyroll’s 10,000,000 monthly visitors, only 200,000 or so actually pay for the service. That means more than 90 percent never give Crunchyroll any money. That’s not a problem for Gao or the anime industry, however. The ads free members see make up the difference, so publishers earn just as much as they would with subscribers.

Comparing Crunchyroll to DVDs is like “apples and oranges”

Even if you agree that supporting Crunchyroll is supporting the anime industry, how do you know that you couldn’t be a better consumer by buying DVDs and Blu-rays? According to Gao, it’s not really something you can compare.

“For each DVD, publishers might see a few dollars at most just because there are so many middlemen. Half of it goes to Best Buy or Amazon. The distributor only gets half or less. DVDs are just one more way to support the industry.”

But if you prefer DVDs to digital streaming, Gao says to go for it. The point is that you care about supporting anime publishers, and you’re actively doing something about it.

“I don’t think it makes sense to tell fans to do digital, to do DVDs, as long as they do commit dollars knowing they’re supporting the industry,” he said.

For me, Crunchyroll is worth it. But at the end of the day what matters is that we’re supporting the anime industry in any way we can. What’s your preferred method of consuming anime?

(Photo via ReviewFix.)