CAA: Christian Anime Alliance

Heeeey, a positive story about the anime biznis. The whole thing is here.[quote]Number One Anime Website Crunchyroll.com Sees Great Opportunities in Helping Traditional Media Companies Grow Audiences and Build Businesses Online

San Francisco, Calif. (May 3, 2010) – Crunchyroll, Inc., reported today an over 40% compounded quarter on quarter revenue growth for the last five quarters. Q1 2010 revenue experienced over 250% growth, against the same quarter last year. Crunchyroll's revenue is driven by the ‘freemium’ business model made up of advertising-supported and subscription streaming as well as virtual goods, monetizing professionally produced content through direct relationships with Japanese licensors and broadcasters.

“With over 5.5 million unique visitors serving 21.8 million video views and over 100 million pageviews in the month of March, Crunchyroll is the most engaged community for anime in the world. We are able to deliver a complete cross-platform experience through our website, branded social applications—including the Naruto Shippūden Official Facebook Application—set-top box products like Boxee and the Crunchyroll iPhone iPad application. Crunchyroll is at the forefront of building online audience and engagement around professional content with our in-house video, social, mobile and device experiences,â€

I've read some opinions on this on another forum and there are a few possibilities to explain the increase in revenue. Those are substantial increases in subscriptions, substantial increase in revenue per ad, and substantial increase in visitors that make ad revenues grow accordingly. Keep in mind there's a recent promotion going on where new subscribers get $20 back, which raises the possibility of some suspect numbers wherein the revenues from the spike in new subscriptions are calculated without accounting for the $20 back. Of course, given that there's no breakdown of the figures, this is all baseless speculation.

Even so, this is excellent news! Crunchyroll is IMHO the best anime provider out there (hulu is a close second) on the web and I'm pleased that they're doing well.

Funimation Comments on Streaming Metrics in Crunchyroll Press Release:[quote="Funimation"]We appreciate Crunchyroll's mention of FUNimation Entertainment in its press release and welcome the comparisons they make between our sites. Both of our companies are dedicated to growing the anime community and, with respect to the internet, find ourselves overlapping in this exciting space as we aim to expand the anime fan base. While we share the same goal, we find we employ different strategies in bringing our fans the content they crave.

There's no doubt Crunchyroll is one site that has become popular for streaming subtitled anime video, and we commend them for their ability to help meet the passionate demand our fans have for viewing the newest content coming out of Japan. Where our strategies diverge is in our ability and desire to hyper-syndicate anime series across many platforms in order to ensure we meet our consumers on those very sites they enjoy the most. As stated previously, we have developed a wide net of partners through the FUNimation Network which resides on such platforms as Hulu, YouTube, TV.com and Anime News Network –]

Lol @ funi getting all butthurt over CR's success.