Especially with Japanese Mangas, I can understand the appeal of piracy. Most of them officially never see the world outside Japan, so they are very hard to obtain for international readers. Which are a big part of the fandom, though.
So (apart from the stupidity of the tale that every copy would have brought 100% of the sales price if there was no piracy) the losses are primarily due to simply not selling their products on markets that are showing demand.
The assumption that pirates would pay rather than simply consuming other media is absurd.
These loss numbers are pulled out of thin air with no reasoning behind them.
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Yeah. A lot of those sites are actually translating them, often from donations by the users. I doubt anyone is getting well paid on the unofficial sites, as when they release official translations a lot of people flock to those as they are often higher quality images.
“The amount of free reading per month on the top 10 English translation piracy sites alone amounts to 800 million US dollars, a figure that is increasing every year and requires immediate action,” ABJ reported, citing figures from May 2024.
This is not the same as money lost, because some portion of those pirate readers might not have been willing to pay even in the absence of piracy.
With that said, the unique positive approach is intriguing.
As I understand it, the pirated copies have unofficial translations… so it wouldn’t have even possible for them to consume the media without the piracy in the first place.
