The Age of Fansubbers and Money

There’s been a lot of hubbub lately about scanlating and moneymaking. Here’s a post from us regarding the other side of the anime/manga fandom.

Now before continuing, here’s a disclaimer. Is this post going to be biased?

Oh hell yes.



Here’s the thing;

Watermarks are retarded

Does Commie use watermarks? No. Not even a logo of the group plastered all over the title scene, which some notable groups love to do.

Do you see this shit? Do you know how fucking annoying that is?

Why do scanlation groups do retarded things like the above? The answer is Money, which will be covered a bit later. For now, more ranting about how incredibly retarded watermarks are.

The argument scanlators have is that they want people who read manga online to know where it came from. Does it fucking matter? You’re a fucking pirate, get over yourselves.

You hear a lot about how Mangafox “steals” their work, and in response scanlators have resorted to watermarking a perfectly good release to shit.

Guess what? Anime streaming sites exist too. There are a fucking ton of them, and we at Commie don’t give a single shit about our “work” being “stolen”. We don’t even use logos. If you were to stream our release on a random site, unless the upload has [Commie] in the title, you would have no fucking idea it was from us. (Unless, of course, you recognize LT Finnegan, but that’s a separate story)

There also exists a “good” manga reading site, Batoto. Batoto actually allows scanlators to be paid for their work through ad revenue. Look around on this site. Do you see ads? No. Do you think any of the 50 million anime streaming sites listed on Google pays us? No, no they don’t.

So how does fansubbing remain alive? What motivates people to do it, if it isn’t money?

Donations. Commie has subsisted entirely on donations and Fileserve money. Now Fileserve is dead, and we will have to do with only donations just like Wikipedia . We have zero ad revenue, no other sites paying us, and absolutely no watermarks.

Now scanlators might argue:

The amount of work put into scanlating is greater than that of fansubbing.

Bullshit.

The average team of people that sees an episode from start to finish consists of at least five people, each putting in a couple of hours. That’s one episode. We do (or at least try to do) seventeen episodes a week. How, you may ask? Sheer willpower and manpower. Commie has a staff of over twenty active members, and we hope to at least double that. None of them are paid. None of them ask to be paid. They do this for the pride, for the enjoyment, and honestly, for the friends you can make while subbing cartoons. Proof? Over 70 people have applied for intern positions in the last two months. These people want to “give back” to the community, and some of them will go on to do exactly that.

A server for providing manga is more expensive than a fansubbing server.

Again, bullshit. If the guys running those things had any idea of efficient coding, a 100mbps server with a decent quad core CPU could provide for everything. Such servers are cheap, $100 at most. Incidentally, encoding the average 720p anime episode would take at least four hours on said server. Bandwidth? What about bandwidth? Commie’s server dishes out 3TB a month, and our XDCC puts out another TB on top of that. Even if you stored your goddamn pictures in uncompressed PNG at full resolution, they would each be about 2MB. You could fit 150 of those pictures in one anime episode (100 for 10bit) .

In conclusion? There is no conclusion. There are “good” scanlators out there who don’t watermark their releases, but their number has been consistently dwindling. Get over yourselves.

You are complaining about people stealing your already stolen work.



Woxxy:

Compared to the [author]’s work, ours is a shitstain, only worth minor credit and a read.



If scanlating completely dies due to people protesting over not being paid for a hobby, then we fansubbers will be laughing at you (not that we’re not already). While you wage war with Mangafox we at Commie will continue providing as many series as humanly possible while training an entire generation of interns.

Long live fansubbing