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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.
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.
I'm not sure that I agree when you say it doesn't apply to all media.
First, when I own physical media I know that I'll have permanent access to the contents, within the scope of my player working and my display and sound system working. Given that I've got VHS and Laserdisc still functioning in the mix I don't think this is all that big of a problem. Online content providers, both properly licensed and unlicensed have shown themselves to be unreliable for a number of reasons. Sometimes a provider closes down. Sometimes a provider is closed down. Sometimes a provider thinks that they have the licensing worked out and it turns out they're wrong so the title is pulled. Sometimes the provider has only licensed the work for a limited duration, or has licensed the work when it's off-season (thinking of christmas specials that are not accessible during christmas except from the one excluslve provider but are available everywhere off-season). Rates change. Even with the attacks on net-neutrality, being able to access may change.
Second, people like to collect things. People like having sets. There's a certain satisfatction in it. Obviously not everyone has this penchant, but that's ok.
Third, going through the motions can be a means to determine if one really wants to watch something, or if one is just doing it as the path of least resistance. Personally I feel I watch too much TV and spend too much time on the Internet already, without having a streaming service and without having cable or other pay-TV. It makes it a lot easier to actually go do something else besides vegetate on the couch if I find myself not able to make a choice for what to watch.
If some of these aspects apply to comic books or graphic novels or manga or whatever you want to call them, then I can see why people want phyiscal media and why they want sets.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
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.
Piracy has saved me plenty. I try to try before I buy. Last time I got burned was Doom 3. Played about 4 hours and hated it. Have not played it since. I downloaded Civilization 6 and what not pleased with it. Deleted the game and saved myself $59.99.
Though consumers want demos, it is not financially wise for publishers to release them. If a consumer tries a demo and dose not like the games, then that is a lost sale. If the consumer has to buy to try and the consumer hates it, then the publisher got their money and another pissed off customer
On Steam, you can ask for refunds on games you played for less than 2 hours.
In fact I sincerely think that Steam did more against piracy than any DRM scheme. They actually responded to many arguments made by pirates :
- You can get refunds (no need to pirate to try)
- You can get games really cheap if you wait (you can still play if you are poor)
- It is convenient : you can play all games you purchased on any PC with Steam installed, and provided you have a good internet connection, once you decide to buy a game, you can typically play it within minutes (downloading from a pirate site / torrent is not faster)
There are of course things that steam don't offer that piracy do, such as being free, less risk of losing the game (account ban, shutdown, ...) and no internet requirement. However, the advantages of piracy are not worth it anymore for many players, even for single player games.
Third, going through the motions can be a means to determine if one really wants to watch something, or if one is just doing it as the path of least resistance. Personally I feel I watch too much TV and spend too much time on the Internet already, without having a streaming service and without having cable or other pay-TV. It makes it a lot easier to actually go do something else besides vegetate on the couch if I find myself not able to make a choice for what to watch.
So your logic is you deny yourself of the obviously better streaming service because it's "too good" and would compel you to use it? I would suggest you apply that thinking to other aspects of your life and see how it goes. E.g., wife too good looking? Trade down to an uglier wife, because after all, you'll be less apt to waste time pursuing sex with her all the time.