March 10, 2008
Interview: CrunchyRoll Raises $4 Million in Funding
Posted by Devin
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CrunchyRoll Inc., a leading destination Anime & Asian media fansubs, raised $4.05 million in Series A funding, according to regulatory filings. Venrock led the round, with partner David Siminoff joining their Board of Directors.
Crunchyroll, a website for fans, offers free content in the United States as well as internationally. Launched in the summer of 2006, Crunchyroll has taken off rapidly, particularly since the spring of 2007. To help with building the company as a business, Series A funding was secured.
Crunchyroll provides Asian-based streaming video that is uploaded by users and moderated by the community, specifically volunteer moderators. Premium users who “donate” $6 per month get "donate patches" added to their profile and access to higher quality video streams. While others feel CrunchyRoll is in violation of copyright & using of the DMCA unfairly, Crunchyroll does strictly comply by removing a large amount of licensed & distributed content (Dragonball Z, Cowboy Bebop, Death Note, Evangelion, One Piece, Gundam, Hunter X Hunter, etc.)
Up to this point, CrunchyRoll’s true intentions have been often misunderstood by industry peers and fans. To help clear the air, Kokoro Media met with Crunchyroll this week on their suddenly discovered VC funding and future intentions.
Starting Crunchyroll up: In 2006, the site was a hobby for Crunchyroll’s founders: engineers which wanted to make genre media easier than downloading fansubs via bittorrent. After tinkering around with Youtube, they saw how easy it was to build and grow their backend on their own. It took off from there– Managing growth: Around mid-2007, the venture capital community started taking an interest in their obvious high traffic numbers. It wasn’t long before Crunchyroll’s founders left their days jobs to work on the site fulltime. With a little more than a handful of employees, Crunchyroll now generates 4+ mill unique visitors, 250+ mil pageviews, and 50 mil video streams a month. 40% of the traffic is from the United States. Moving forward: Like Hulu, long-format video streams will eventually include in-stream advertising. "Pay for play or ownership downloads don’t work because the anime community has been living on years off free fansubs," explained Crunchyroll, "but if its long content, on a clean site" unlike Hulu, "part of a like-minded community" it can succeed. The difference is the payoff after the ad: you’ll wait 1-2 minutes to watch a 24 minute episode of a 56 episode series, but you won’t wait through a 30 second ad for a 5 minute clip of user-generated crap. Additionally, this spring’s launch of new tools including collaborative subbing of video streams will only increase community stickiness and interaction. "We’re here to prove the model on a windfall of content."
Becoming legit: Crunchyroll has been in discussions with a "select number of Japanese firms" over legitimizing their streaming content use with licensing fees. A demonstration of the advertising business model with a select number of partners may be coming this spring. Generating revenue $$ would make future discussions "easier than asking the entire industry to take a small leap of faith." In the future, Crunchyroll’s true intention is "to reach out to any and all rights holders" and license the content legally.
Filed To: Distribution / Digital / Licensing / Adv/Marketing / Interview
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March 6, 2008
E-Manga’s Second Coming or Still Treading Water?
Posted by Devin
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Even though its been almost two years since the Sony E-reader debuted with electronic pages of manga, we’re no closer to discovering if e-manga will come home to roost. In the area of e-readers, the reviews for the Kindle make it seem better for text than graphics. Other platforms such as Cybook (pictured here with an example of manga) don’t have the available content. Frankly e-book readers cost at least $300, and then you have to buy the content. It doesn’t make sense tot he consumer.
On the other hand, the online format keeps growing: CPM, NetComics, and Del Rey along with quite a few other publishers have sample programs, subscriptions, or whole volumes, etc. The list keeps growing. Joining the mix is Infinity Studies this week with manga via PDF.
Cory Doctorow has a another idea: use the mobile we have like iPhones (like this example) and make e-books work on what we have:
Handheld game consoles, phones, and other multipurpose devices have found their way into the hands of people from every walk of life. In some countries, mobile phone penetration is above 100 percent — that is, a significant proportion of the population maintain more than one phone, for example, a work cellular and a home cellular.
Cory also thinks “E-Ink” works, when prices go down will be the way to go. Maybe, but what’s popular online combined with the convergence of mobile & web may be our future, says Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo
As the Internet is freed from the limitations of the desktop, we are taking mobility into a completely new realm of possibility. We are redefining the Internet itself as it increasingly becomes a medium of immediate and personal experiences.
Filed To: Distribution / Retail / Digital / Mobile
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KokoroMedia Returns
Posted by Devin
After a well deserved and necessary break, we return. We tried to keep the lights on here–
If you have any news items, please contact us at news @ kokoromedia.com
Filed To: Kokoro Media
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