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.)

Why Gundam Build Fighters means now is a great time to get into Gunpla

Anime, Figures and Toys

Like Gunpla? Click the image below to visit my new blog, Gunpla 101. 

gunpla101

gundam

In 1980, the first ever Gunpla, or Gundam model kit, came on the market in Japan. It would be another decade until the hobby was popularized in the west. But now today, 34 years after Gundam first aired, Gunpla is bigger than ever.

In Japan, Gunpla models make up 90 percent of the entire plastic model market’s income. In the English speaking world, a Gunpla kit is in the top 15 best sellers in the “Models & Model Kits” section as of this writing. And of course, Gundam Build Fighters, a show about kids who build models, is streaming right now in both the east and west.

Gundam Build Fighters is unusual in the franchise because it is a meta show, where the characters are Gundam-watching fans and Gunpla builders rather than soldiers or pilots. Filled with references to other Gundam series and obscure in-jokes, it’s a show about Gundam otaku for Gundam otaku.

Protagonist Sei Iori works in his family’s Gunpla store and dreams of entering the Gunpla Battle World Championship, where builders fight with Gunpla virtually, Angelic Layer style. Sei is a champ at building Gunpla, but not much of a fighter. Fortunately he meets a mysterious boy named Reiji (possibly from space) who’s a battling pro. The two team up against rivals like the student council president and an idol singer. (In this universe, basically everyone’s into Gunpla.)

And here’s the thing—even though the Gunpla characters build are clearly homages to famous Gundams from other series in the franchise, they’re not exact replicas. As you might have guessed, it’s part of Bandai’s plan to sell even more Gundam models.

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In tandem with the show, they’ve released a new grade of Gunpla similar to High Grade: HGBC, or High Grade Build Custom. Basically, these are new HG models of the most popular Gundams from every series, now with interchangeable parts. You can mix and match pieces from any Gundam in the franchise’s history, allowing for easy customization.

If it’s not cool enough that you might be able to get your hands on models that were last produced in the ‘90s, it’s amazing that you can be creative as you like with them. Just like characters in Gundam Build Fighters, you can mix and match all your favorite parts to get something like the show’s Zaku Amazing, a custom version of Char’s Zaku. (Or you can buy that model outright, yet another new grade called High Grade Build Fighters.)

Before now, the rigidity of Gunpla modeling instructions may have been a big barrier to entry for some people. But now, there’s no way you can mess your Gunpla up. Just call it “custom” and enjoy it!

I’m sure whatever I end up building with be a horrifying Gunpla homunculus. But damned if I’m not going to have fun with it.

Like Gunpla? Click the image below to visit my new blog, Gunpla 101. 

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Otaku Links: The Internet never forgets

Otaku Links

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(Illustration via HomeStarRunner.com.)

Why you might already be an otaku journalist

Journalism

Here’s one thing I never told you: some of my most esteemed otaku journalism heroes never considered themselves to be otaku journalists. I’m talking about:

Oprah Winfrey, whose passionate reporting got her fired from her first job.

“As a reporter, you’re not supposed to empathize with the people that you’re reporting on, and it’s very difficult to be writing copy when somebody’s been in an accident,” she said later.

Today, Oprah’s empathy for her interview subjects and audience alike is what has made her so unique and relatable among TV personalities.

Rachel Carson, who wrote about what she loved intending to help her audience feel the same. Her poetic environmentalist opus, Silent Spring, doesn’t come from a distance.

Though she was careful to meticulously fact-check every detail, Carson let her writing speak through the everyday voices of farmers and housewives—along with noted biologists. Her writing wasn’t so much about the science behind pesticides, as it was about introducing readers to the people and communities who felt its effects most intimately.

As Carson once said, “It is not half so important to know as to feel.”

Tom Wolfe, who helped found “the New Journalism” and, more so than writing mechanically about the events of his day, told entertaining stories that happened to be true.

Wolfe believed that the journalist was as much a character in his stories as any source. He argued that his entrenched position in the community he was reporting on lent him accuracy.

“I am the first to agree that the New Journalism should be as accurate as traditional journalism,” he said. “In fact my claims for the New Journalism, and my demands upon it, go far beyond that. I contend that it has already proven itself more accurate than traditional journalism—which unfortunately is saying but so much…”

What I call Otaku Journalism has gone by a lot of different names. It’s been called “Saturated Journalism,” “Submersion Journalism,” “New Journalism,” and even, “The New New Journalism.” Sometimes, it’s in the first person, sometimes not. But every time, it refers to a kind of reporting that acknowledges the reporter’s flawed position as a human observer—and makes attempts to enhance, rather than minimize, the reporter’s impassioned stance.

After all this time, aspiring journalists are still taught to put away our leanings and to keep our distance, even though we know this doesn’t actually lead to more interesting—and certainly not more accurate or informed—journalism. I also don’t think that acknowledging your humanity and that of your audience is at odds with a carefully fact-checked, true story.

I coined “Otaku Journalism” because, as a geek, the kind of deep involvement that I saw in my favorite journalistic essays immediately looked like otaku fandom to me: the obsessive, life-consuming passion for absorbing everything there is to know about a subject. I still prefer this title to the vague “New Journalism.” It makes it apparent that, in my opinion at least, the reporting worth reading is done by the journalists who geek out about what they do.

The truth about Boys’ Love and rape culture

Anime, Fandom

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A few days ago, my colleague Fruzsina Eördögh quoted me in an article about Boys’ Love, that niche, distinctly feminine genre targeted at girls who like boys.

It’s just the latest time I’ve been asked about my thoughts on BL, by a list of people that includes friends, colleagues, former employers, and even prospective employers (I guess I’m in a particularly unusual line of business in this respect).

Lately, especially when I’m speaking to outsiders who don’t watch BL, or even anime, I tell them something simplified, a little bit like what I said to Fruzsina:

“Two guys together is a safe sexual environment, free from rape and women’s other worries about sex and violence.”

In my defense, this is only the first line of a long conversation Fruzsina and I had over Gchat trying to unpack what it is that makes BL so alluring to women, especially young women. But let me explain myself a little further.

A “safe space”… for women

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When I say BL is “free from rape and women’s other worries about sex and violence,” I really mean the viewer. In a BL romance, there is no female avatar to worry about. When you take the woman out of the equation, the female viewer is free to not worry about danger for a change.

In a hetero romance show, there are a lot of disasters that could befall a female love interest. She could get killed off, in order to motivate the male hero. She could get raped to move the plot. She could be slut shamed for her sexual feelings.

Really, it’s that last part that makes BL such a safe space for young women. Men are “supposed” to have sexual feelings, and they’re never shamed for them in the media. So when women consume romances between two men, the feelings of guilt they’d otherwise have for enjoying it disappear.

Basically, there are several different reasons young women could be drawn to BL, and none of them say anything good about our society’s relationship with female sexuality. It’s nothing like the “two is better than one” explanation of why straight men like lesbian porn. For one thing, BL isn’t even supposed to be pornographic most of the time.

Why is rape a BL theme anyway?

The other problematic part of my quote is when I say BL takes place in a “safe sexual environment.”

If you’re a BL fan, you’ve probably got alarm bells going off. As fans know, rape and non-consent are hallmark cliches in BL classics like Gravitation, FAKE, even Junjou Romantica, the series Fruzsina used to illustrate the article!

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But that’s the really difficult part. Since concern about getting raped is such a traumatic part of daily life for women, why are BL fans consuming so many series with non-consent themes?

First, it’s important to note that most BL is VERY tame. The most we ever see on screen is kissing. Implied sex, and implied rape, take place off screen and are referred to after the fact in order to drive the plot.

Perhaps in BL, the line between fantasy and reality is so strict that female viewers can let their guards down. BL is highly fictional. It’s not meant to portray a realistic gay relationship. (There IS another genre targeted at gay men, called bara or Men’s Love.) One common BL trope is to have a seme, a masculine aggressor, and an uke, a feminine submissive.

These character types look so different from actual humans that they give us hilarious memes like “yaoi hands,” a syndrome where the seme’s hand is bigger than the uke’s head. When creators resort to rape as a plot device (and I say “resort” since I think it’s uncreative), it perhaps seems as surreal as every other aspect of the relationship. Maybe. I don’t have a final answer for this, and apparently, neither does anyone else.

My sordid BL backstory

I got into BL the same way Fruzsina did—the same way a lot of teen girls do: real boys are scary. (I didn’t realize that I thought this way because of the media indoctrination I’d already received.) I certainly wasn’t ready to date them, and I didn’t even want to think about what it was like to be with them. BL let me explore my sexuality without worrying about either of those things.

I wrote terrible, childish fanfiction where my favorite anime characters had crushes on each other and occasionally got to first base. My middle school friend group obtained a copy of FAKE, one of the first BL titles released in the US. I pirated Gravitation, even though it took more than a week to download. (Sorry, anime industry! I own it legally now.)

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And then, I just stopped liking it for a long time. In high school, I started dating boys who were, unsurprisingly, nothing like the boys in my BL shows or fanfiction. (If it isn’t clear by now, BL characters are young women in male bodies, mirrors of ourselves.) I didn’t need the safety of BL anymore once I was ready to learn what boys are really like.

Weirdly, I didn’t get back into BL until after I was married. Free! came out this summer and it was like BL junk food. It felt good to watch a show that was targeted right at me for a change. I ended up watching it with my husband and a mutual friend, who both got kind of hooked on the plot.

Going online to check out the state of BL fanfiction, I was floored by the sheer amount that exists today compared to when I was a teen. There’s not just BL, but slash, a genre of fanfiction/fanart for pairing together same-sex couples from basically anything, from The Avengers to real life hockey teams. Slash is just as old as BL; it just wasn’t on my radar before. That means women who aren’t even into anime are taking part.

BL isn’t going away; it’s actually getting bigger. And until our culture starts telling a different story to young women about their sexuality and bodies, the appeal of BL is just going to grow.

(Image sources: Free!, Gravitation, gargarstegosaurus, lemonorangelime.)