Crunchyroll's Net Profit Falls By Over 60%: What This Might Mean for Anime Fans - Anime Corner

5 months ago by commander to c/anime

Crunchyroll's net profit for the fiscal year ending 2025 was 453 million yen (~$2.9 million), as published in Japan's Official Gazette (and reported by
Taleya 67 points 5 months ago

Shouldn't have fucked your customer base then

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SpikesOtherDog 43 points 5 months ago

That's the fucked-up thing, though. Their subscriber count has almost doubled since 2024—yet they are hemorrhaging money like this. Smells like hookers and blow in here.

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RickyRigatoni 21 points 5 months ago

Don't forget all the money wasted on the ai generated dubbing that's even worse than early days funimation.

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Unboxious 11 points 5 months ago

Wasn't that Amazon Prime?

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RickyRigatoni 16 points 5 months ago

yes it was. crunchyroll did ai subs.

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kotsune 2 points 5 months ago

100% agreed here. It’s their own fault for being too greedy.

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RightHandOfIkaros 41 points 5 months ago

Probably shouldn't have sold out to Sony and sold my data like twice and then given away data in obviously avoidable breaches.

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iuseasahibtw 38 points 5 months ago

The open seas be a callin' me ma8ty....yar!

Man the BitTorrent client, fire up the VPNs, load up Tor! There be torrents to download!

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anikahj 11 points 5 months ago

What anime is that? Pretty sure I’ve watched, but can not remember

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wjs018 24 points 5 months ago

Looks like Bodacious Space Pirates.

Fun fact - I visited Tokyo years ago when I had a friend living over there teaching English as part of the JET program. When I visited Ueno Park, there was a group of cosplayers in the park all in costumes from this show doing a photoshoot. I had no idea what show it was at the time, but figured it out years later when I came across a random image in a thread like this one and was able to piece it together.

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nyan 14 points 5 months ago

Mouretsu Pirates, AKA Bodacious Space Pirates, I think.

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Rottcodd 37 points 5 months ago

Crunchyroll is never going to solve the problem because Crunchyroll is the problem.

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GreenKnight23 28 points 5 months ago
  • stop using AI subtitles
  • fix the platform problems
  • become PCI compliant
  • bring back comments
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brillotti 27 points 5 months ago

Crunchyroll is a scourge on the Anime industry. The earlier it falls, the faster better services can take its place.

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ReluctantlyZen 6 points 5 months ago

If Sony doesnt buy that one too

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Tiresia 2 points 5 months ago

How do you buy peer to peer filesharing?

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ReluctantlyZen 22 points 5 months ago

How to fumble the ball when you're basically the only real player. I miss Wakanim.

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BingBong 11 points 5 months ago

I cancelled my subscription when they went to Israeli ai subbing tools. Sucks since I would like to watch lots of their shows

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LurkingLuddite 9 points 5 months ago

Those shows exist outside of crunchyfucks.

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SorteKanin 9 points 5 months ago

I'm out of the loop, why are people hating on crunchyroll?

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NineSwords 37 points 5 months ago

Where to start. They have so many issues that there is something in there for everyone:

  • price hikes and end of the free tier
  • declining quality of subs and the use of AI for subs
  • activist localization slash “woke” changes to the subs when humans translate <--- with the previous point, now both the pro-AI and anti-ai crowd are unhappy
  • data breach (at least one, but I think they had two)
  • Funimation customers got fucked since they lost access to purchased content after the merger with Crunchy
  • monopolistic tendencies and general corporate greed and tactics
  • comment sections got removed because people dared to be negative

And possibly a myriad others. I don't think I've ever heard Crunchy mentioned in a positive way.

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ReluctantlyZen 10 points 5 months ago

activist localization slash “woke” changes to the subs when humans translate

This I don't get. This hardly happens, if at all. I hear more complaints about it (particularly from the anti-woke crowd) than I see it happening

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LwL 9 points 5 months ago

The fact that it happens at all is honestly baffling though. The anti-woke crowd absolutely plays it up (or more likely just gets fed sensationalized headlines and never verifies them) beyond its actual scope, but mostly it's just the crown on top of a lot of general low quality localization. Which isn't even necessarily the localizers fault, as from what I know they were often overworked and had very little time to translate, or were missing the visual context.

The recent scandal with the game yunyun syndrome is the worst I know of, but I vaguely recall some obviously politically motivated changes in meaning in anime subs. It's not made up, but it's really just one particular expression of a wider issue with tl quality.

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ReluctantlyZen 4 points 5 months ago

Yeah, I'm not saying it doesn't happen, just rarely. Not nearly enough to be like "I'm happy AI translations are replacing real translations" or drop CR for it. The only few examples I know are from dubs when Funimation was still a thing (Dragon Maid, and even then, those were like 3-4 lines in the entire show, some of which aren't even that bad and also has some backlash from the "wokes" for other things).

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Tiresia 2 points 5 months ago

For reference, these "woke changes" include translating a character asking an adult character whether that character is attracted to underage girls as "are you a pedophile?".

Here, 'pedophile' is the translation of the Japanese word "ロリコン", which is a shortened transliteration of "Lolita complex", referring to the literary work Lolita about a pedophile attracted to underage girls and the Freudian term for a sexual obsession. (compare Oedipus complex).

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Smash 2 points 5 months ago

The subs every show I'm watching this season have been butchered. Maybe your Japanese just isn't as good to capture the difference but it happens extremely often

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ReluctantlyZen 3 points 5 months ago

I'm not disputing bad subs, but I am disputing changed subs for political reasons

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Unboxious 2 points 5 months ago

Really? My Japanese is pretty good but I haven't noticed anything like that. Could you give some specific examples?

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NineSwords 1 point 5 months ago

I would assume every time you hear complaints flare up again it's because there has been a new case.

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ReluctantlyZen 2 points 5 months ago

It's not per se that I hear it flare up, I just hear about it every so often as a complaint in general with CR or when LLM translations get brought up, but rarely with any examples.

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Unboxious 1 point 5 months ago

It's something I oft see cited, but I can't remember the last time I saw a reasonable example that wasn't at least 5 years old.

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cmbabul 7 points 5 months ago

These are all much more substantial reasons but when I stopped using them in 2021ish it was because their apps and website were janky as fuck.

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hypnicjerk 6 points 5 months ago

don't forget that they started out as a pirate site but since they went 'legit' have spent money on anti-piracy

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Spacehooks 1 point 5 months ago

Comments sections made it feel different than flat out pirating.

Then they rating system was a pain.

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webpack 2 points 5 months ago

animekai had commenting lol (too bad it was just killed)

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Spacehooks 1 point 5 months ago

It just brings sense of community to being on the app or site. Used to love it on Hulu too. Its half the fun on youtube but of course they make it difficult now.

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Shayeta 8 points 5 months ago

There's a bunch of minor reasons when combined add up to "Crunchyroll is doing a worse job than free pirate sites despite having more resources.".

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Unboxious 7 points 5 months ago

The link gives me a 404.

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Die4Ever 7 points 5 months ago path: 0 23824835 23825402, hotness: undefined, score: 7, children: 0
hypnicjerk 1 point 5 months ago

don't see the article anywhere on the site

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Unboxious 1 point 5 months ago

I guess it must've gotten taken down.

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mo_lave 1 point 5 months ago path: 0 23824835 23825316 23842199, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0
HubertManne 5 points 5 months ago

I mean I stopped even checking because they pretty much just abandoned free accounts. Worst possible time given amazon has upped its anime offering big time.

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Matth 4 points 5 months ago

It's a shame there is no information on what caused profit falls... It would have been nice to know what's the gross revenue compared to the previous year. Same for staff costs and other operating expenses. Notably, is AI the reason for decline in profit?

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SneakyWeasel 3 points 5 months ago

Hayase. Thats all im saying

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AwesomeLowlander 1 point 5 months ago

the Japanese branch of Crunchyroll's net profits for the fiscal period ending in December 2025 were 453 million yen (about US$2.85 million), a drop of 63% from the previously reported 1.239 billion yen (about US$7.79 million) in 2024.

According to Crunchyroll, its Japan office "traditionally consists of content, programming, production and acquisition teams, which are non-revenue generating."

Makes absolutely no sense. How is a non-revenue-generating branch experiencing a drop in profit?

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