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 $$ would make future discussions "easier than asking the entire industry to take a small leap of faith." In the future, Crunchyroll’s true intention is "to reach out to any and all rights holders" and license the content legally.
Filed To: Distribution / Digital / Licensing / Adv/Marketing / Interview
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[…] In an interview with the blog Kokoro Media, the site’s unnamed founders state that their web traffic started attracting interest from venture capital in mid-2007. The company says that the site has over 4 million unique visitors and serves 50 million streams per month. The company unveiled its first legally authorized anime stream, a short from the Flash animated series that later became Eagle Talon The Movie - The Chancellor Only Lives Twice, late last month. […]
Pingback by Crunchyroll Gets $4M In Capital « vashNYC — March 11, 2008 @ 9:01 pm
[…] And now Kokoro Media offers yet another point of view: CrunchyRoll’s. The site hopes to legitimize itself and offer legal, ad-sponsored content for free. Crunchyroll has been in discussions with a “select number of Japanese firms” over legitimizing their streaming content use with licensing fees. A demonstration of the advertising business model with a select number of partners may be coming this spring. Generating revenue $$ would make future discussions “easier than asking the entire industry to take a small leap of faith.” […]
Pingback by a geek by any other name » Blog Archive » Crunchy Roll Crunches on $4 Million — March 12, 2008 @ 4:09 pm
[…] Kokoro Media […]
Pingback by Crunchyroll | AnimePortal.cl — March 13, 2008 @ 10:04 pm