I had recently posted on the "Mangafox's mendacity reaches new levels thread", which has since been locked but I believe I missed a very important point in that post that also opens up questions about the future of scanlation. I think that it deserves its own topic.

I myself, and many others in this community, I believe, are under a delusion. That is, the misunderstanding that we are in a war against Mangafox. I think this is incorrect. We are not in a war against mangafox so much as in a war of appeal, a marketing group trying to recover our share of consumers/audience.

The reason?

Because we spend a lot of time working on our projects, we try our best to do good quality releases and we do this for no personal profit, and yet, sitting there beside us are people who do not sustain this community and make an estimated USD84 000$ per year (that is only mangafox based on estimates of their income at http://www.fanaticnetworks.com/forums/topic/7463-the-tale-behind-mangafox/ ) and based on estimates by my very well informed friend on internet server costs (you can see the break down in the post above). A reasonable salary for no work.

My first point

As Fovika inquired in page 3 of this thread and as I think Wolfinthesheep might be have implied a few times: why aren't we posting outside of our own community? Fovika asked why not in MF forums, I ask, why not on Facebook, Twitter, in real newspapers, which we can use to spread our story. The only way to inform the leechers who frequent MF or other online readers is to tell them everything we can, as many times as we can. Leechers, as wolfinthesheep and others have claimed, don't care about our community, they don't even know about it. But, they surely would agree that supporting their sources is the best thing they can do, not to mention that we have the potential to give them much better service than online aggregating sites. In fact, an actual newspaper article, detailing MF's past legal problems, infringements against authors as well as their separate identity to Scanlators might do much to damage their reputation and even improve scanlators' somewhat.

At first, you might bring up the point that scanlators are still in a very flimsy position in terms of the law but I don't think we have to be. The second things people will bring up is that we are being cynical about our motives, which come down to MF's market share and the money they make...

Which brings me to my second point.

What we are looking for is not only readers but money. And the reasons we want the money are completely different from MF and other readers.

The scanlating community (at least I hope) is proud as well as responsible and has no interest in pocketing the money we can make. Mangafox in Alexa's top site rankings is the 935th most visited site... in fact, mangareader is in the 800s, interestingly enough. (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/mangafox.com )

If their advertising contracts, which are way higher than what our groups and batoto can even hope to get, were ours and we were making not just USD84 000$ that MF alone makes every year, but 100-200k after you calculate other online readers, there are huge possibilities for expansion in scanlating that did not exist before the MF age.

Even in Korea, where Daum/Naver control the manwha market, manwha are being marketed through online structures based on advertising. There is not reason, either in terms of revenue for the publishers and authors or in terms of legitimacy, that we should not be licensing series ourselves.

Legitimacy because, after the MF age, scanlators have adapted to make their own readers and even start centralising their contact in sites like Manga updates and Batoto. Particularly with a unified front, we have a lot more weight to achieve contracts, if not for everything, for many of the series that count, we can hope. If revenue is based off of advertising, there should be no limits. If publishers in Asia have even a grain of sense, they will embrace this huge source of revenue on top of an interested and enthusiastic work force.

Before you get too enthusiastic or too critical of what I am proposing, I point out that this is hypothetical and I am trying to bring attention to the potential that we have in these revenues and the probably objectives of what we would try to do should we have them, in place of MF and other online readers. I also have no guarantees that asian publishers have "any grain of sense", the reason scanlating is so loosely regulated is because they do not target the international market in the first place and are usually very conservative in making contracts.

The first, step, however, is not to decrease the quality of our readers and our releases by watermarking, making obstacles, trolling, etc.... I believe it is to know that what we want is well informed leechers and better quality and legitimacy and work up the market from there, not down. The least we can do is tell everyone we know the dire situation of profiteering in scanlating today.

(Edit: @Kaioh: I just now noticed your last post on the mendacity thread, I hope this is not part of the type of thread you dislike. the point of this thread is not to complain about MF, it is to say that complaining/warring is not helping ourselves and that we should be looking for a different path based on informing and looking at future potential. I hope that this is productive and will help the scanlating community, hence I don't think it should be viewed as facetious but I do not know if that is how you will see it. I hope I have your good will)

Quote from Kaioh

Reported multiple times, so, thread locked.

Im sick of threads like this as they always break down. Next person who starts one is getting a ban thrown at them.

From the "Mangafox Mendacity" thread...Lol >>
That thread really was annoying so I don't think he's lying about a ban.

Quote from tallrice

the point of this thread is not to complain about MF, it is to say that complaining/warring is not helping ourselves and that we should be looking for a different path based on informing and looking at future potential.

LOL weren't they all? 🙄

[img]http://i196.photobucket.com/albums/aa229/azrinirza/makotoshinkai1_zpse3901c5a.gif[/img]
Everyday I'm tumblin'

What part of "Next person who starts one is getting a ban thrown at them" was not clear?

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