| Ka-pi96 said: Ya know, just for once I'd love to see an anime studio try and make money based on viewership. European & American shows make money that way so I can't see why anime studios couldn't. Surely airing the anime at a decent time and not something like 2am, having a Netflix like streaming service or even something like youtube where they get their revenue through ads and selling dvds/blu rays at a reasonable price to maximise their sales doesn't sound a bad way of making money to me. Sounds easier than relying on wealthy collectors buying all the figurines and massively overpriced dvds, doesn't it? |
Japanese-centric companies often struggle to understand that what works in Japan often doesn't work in other regions. That's why it took so long to get anime into a viable industry in the west. That's why a lot of the ventures by Japanese companies into the rest of the world have been failures. The anime industry over here is littered with them. First, it was trying to convince them that they wanted too much for the publishing rights when the industry was still small, then it was trying to convince them that super expensive VHS tapes and then DVDs weren't going to sell like they did in Japan. That backbone of super-otaku culture they depended on over there didn't really exist over here.
When I started watching anime, the only legal method to watch was to buy ultra-expensive physical media. Most anime fans traded VHS tapes online or ordered tapes from fansub distros. Every step of the way it seems like the Japanese have struggled against anime succeeding in the west. It's been a difficult journey to get to where we are now. The best thing that ever happened to anime companies relative to this market was the explosion of fansubs, which many of them tried to shut down from the start.
