Posts Tagged “business”

The confirmation that ADV will distribute Clannad in North America as well as some previously unrescued Geneon titles in Tsukihime and Mahoromatic hit late Sunday night and is a big news item to begin the week with, but don’t forget that it was CEO John Ledford’s interview with ICv2 that spawned said news.

Long-time readers might remember that Ledford mentioned ranking titles as A, B, and C in a May 2007 interview with ANN and said that “most people buy their A titles and they download their B’s and C’s” due to the prevalence of fansubs. Now 17 months later and after overseeing his company’s strategy shift, he calls the high-profile content ‘anime events’ that still sell well and the former C’s are now classified as ’super-niche’ titles that are reliable due to their core fanbases, their low upfront licensing cost, and the cumulative ‘long tail’ sales. Nozomi has been keen on with putting out sub-only sets of fan favorites including Marimite and Aria in recent months and doing well at it while Media Blasters has been producing hybrid releases with slightly broader appeal (e.g. Rurouni Kenshin, Berserk, Genshiken) for years. By the way, Chris Anderson’s original Wired article is four years old this month.

Unfortunately, the middle of the road titles (formerly in the B range) remain financial gambles for R1 licensors, according to Ledford:

Where things get tricky is in between the big hits and the smaller niche titles. Series that are strong but may not be world-beaters. Viewership is larger than ever, thanks to the Internet, but fans just aren’t buying DVDs like they used to. And when the costs stay the same, you’ve got a lot of solid, quality productions that end up running in the red.

That’s why right now the best business to be in are the hits and the ‘super-niche’ titles. Anything in between can kill you.

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This afternoon I watched the first episode of Keitai Shoujo on BOST TV, the newly launched anime digital distribution service. (Is it pronounced bost or boost?) It was a nice quick experience considering that anime was my only option for my region (USA) - I didn’t have the privilege to pay to watch episodes of Shinigami no Ballad or Hanbun no Tsuki, although I could watch the non-credit openings for free. What these three titles have in common, though, is why I am optimistic on how this venture will affect the online anime market by giving them a chance to make overseas revenue.
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This morning ANN published an editorial by Justin Sevakis, the founder of ANN who now works for Imaginasian TV, in which he described the sorry state the industry is currently in financially, how it got to that state of affairs, and the problems preventing any significant change from happening. Apparently, the numbers are “terrifying” and the business model is clearly failing. His doom-and-gloom piece, I think, made many good points about how difficult the situation is now for licenses to break even due to years non-interference with fansub distribution.
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