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Online Piracy Can Boost Comic Book Sales, Research Finds (torrentfreak.com)
A number of studies show that piracy helps movies, TV shows, and music albums find a much wider audience, which in turn, often times, help in boosting their revenue. But what about comic books? A new academic study shows that piracy can have a positive effect on comic book sales, too, albeit under certain conditions. From a report on TorrentFreak: Manga, in particular, has traditionally been very popular on file-sharing networks and sites. These are dozens of large sites dedicated to the comics, which are downloaded in their millions. According to the anti-piracy group CODA, which represents Japanese comic publishers, piracy losses overseas are estimated to be double the size of overseas legal revenue. With this in mind, Professor Tatsuo Tanaka of the Faculty of Economics at Keio University decided to look more closely at how piracy interacts with legal sales. In a natural experiment, he examined how the availability of pirated comic books affected revenue. Interestingly, the results show that decreased availability of pirated comics doesn't always help sales. In fact, for comics that no longer release new volumes, the effect is reversed. "Piracy decreases sales of ongoing comics, but it increases sales of completed comics," Professor Tanaka writes. "To put this another way, displacement effect is dominant for ongoing comics, and advertisement effect is dominant for completed comics," he adds.
There's a fun factor in holding a coming book in our hands. Not to mention some people see comic books as a possible investment. These don't apply to all media, though!
Manga in particular doesn't get published in the US until large groups of fans and translation groups put together their own scanlations and publish them. As with the old piracy nonsense, the 'pirated sales' are nonexistent because the sales would never have happened anyway - what random US fan that isn't JP-literate would buy a JP published manga unless they had read at least some of it first? How do they read it prior to it being scanned and translated ("pirated")?
If it weren't for the original pirates passing around photocopied manga and horrible quality 5-time-copied TV rips of shows on VHS way back in the 80s and 90s, the market would barely exist in the US.
With the rapid availability of media of all kinds, I have a lot of difficulty figuring out what to consume. By the time I get around to watching a show or movie I had put on a mental list to watch (such as No Country For Old Men), eight years had already rolled by. Piracy allows one cheap ways to at least test out media. In the case of Japanese manga, there is a bit of a special case where US translations lag significantly behind the Japanese releases and, while fan translations leave something to be desired, timeliness is what people seem to want. A good example of how this worked well was a subbed stream of Naruto very close to the Japanese releases, which AFAIK did well.
It seems to me consumers want a much more buffet-style setup (a la music or video streaming) with timely releases (in the case of Japanese media), so it's what companies should work to provide.
Here is what what I do for fun. Shooting rats with N_I_G_H_T ViSiOn!!!
tis true,
See facebook as an example
But... but... the MAFIAA have told us that that is TEH 3VIL!!!!!!!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Sounds like an argument for shorter copyright terms (much shorter).
There's a lot of stuff that I wouldn't have given the time of day for, in fact, most stuff. But often I will download a series and discover that not only is it up my alley but it's amazing.
Then I head to Amazon and buy the fuck out of it, not out of any moral duty or guilt or anything but to either clear space on my drive or to actually get a quality transfer.
This process has been ongoing for about 10 years for me and man, I thought my movie collection would get smaller with the advent of PirateBay and the like but the opposite has happened... quite dramatically.
I mean it's like how the radio used to work, you'd hear an awesome song on and then you'd go buy the record.
Big Media would never believe such a study. Even if Einstein, Hawking, Newton, da Vinci, Galileo, Tesla, Faraday, Keynes, Friedman, and Marx all participated in the study.
To the first point, could pirating simply be more of an affect due to popularity? That is, the more likely someone is to know about a product, the more likely they will consume or pirate it?
The second point is interesting. I assume this may be hitting a different type of consumer.
The more people who know about your "thing" (movie/music/book/art) the more people will be interested in it. Most artists, and even most manufacturers in ANY field, wind up giving away a significant fraction of their production runs just so they can sell the rest. It's called advertising and it costs money.
Of course, it can be argued that the people who download your free stuff would never buy it in any case, so it wouldn't impact your bottom line.
So by snuffing out Fan Films while they they are not making New Star Trek, they are Killing their brand.
But reigning in fan films while they are "actually" producing Good product is a good thing for them.
Wow.. how stupid the studios are.
I read a few Japanese Light Novels, only a few dozen a year, still can't read the native language. The vast majority are fan translated before getting licensed in the US. Once licensed I will usually pick up one volume to try and support the art I enjoy. I usually stop at one volume as the licensed versions are Americanized to shit. I wouldn't mind purchasing the originals straight from the Japaneses publisher, even though I can't read them, as long as the fan translated versions weren't DCMA'd to hell like they often are. That being said, I torrent or just directly download Epubs I want to read, no hassle and they work on any computer or my phone.
You want my hard earned money, give me what I want. Don't try to force me to buy what you sell.
How this ties into Piracy = Sales, I have yet to figure out for Light Novels. For Anime I own a few dozen boxed sets now. $60 to $180 a box, mediocre Americanized subtitles usually, sometimes edited/censored to shit. I watch the Pirated B/D versions on my computer, I will still buy the set from who sell it here in the states, and it stays unopened often. Minor support, would like to do more for the artist that make things I enjoy, but a language gap, laziness and ignorant geo blocking license schemes screw that up.
tl:dr I agree, it's possible.
Every time that you use a variation of the word "Pirate" in reference to copyright infringement, you frame the argument in the favor of the MPAA / RIAA.
Stop being their tool!
I think the big things that turn me off from buying comics are: the constant cross-overs, requiring you to buy a different comic to follow the story, the lack of story progression, and the difficulty of stopping by a physical store on a weekly / monthly basis to pickup an issue that is only 15-20 pages of story.
I much prefer the story arcs of things like Transmetropolitan or most manga.