[Locked] FAKKU State of the Union 2016

Read through every post on here, gonna reply to a few things I saw that I think I can answer.

Just a small brief blurb about who I am (cuz I tend to get "who the fuck is this guy?"):
I'm a web developer at FAKKU who has been working at FAKKU for a year now. Before FAKKU, I worked at Digital Manga Inc for a year. Before Digital Manga, I worked for Anime Expo for almost 5 years. I have extremely close ties to a large number of Japanese companies within the anime and manga industry.

Why can't you offer PayPal / Circumvent their rules by doing donations / points?
PayPal allows merchants to sell physical adult products, but once you start doing digital products that are of adult nature, that is where they draw the line. For them it's seen as a high risk. There have been waaaaay too many instances over the years of people buying porn and then doing a chargeback. Or using stolen PayPal accounts to pay for porn. On top of this, the banks and credit card companies PayPal works with also don't really like it. So they allow put pressure on the situation.

In regards to trying to go around their system by doing "donations" or points. It's still the same situation. We are still as a result of that "donation" or point purchase allowing you access to digital 18+ content. PayPal does have a group of people that monitor things like this. It's not worth the risk of possibly losing PayPal all together.

Why did you have to remove parody doujinshi? They aren't licensed anyways.
There are a few reasons.

1) We have had a few instances now where Japanese companies we've wanted to work with have straight up told us: "not until you remove parody doujinshi". Why would they say this? Well, a number of these companies work with the companies that produce those series being parodied. They do not want to risk ruining their relationship with them in Japan by associating themselves with a company freely distributing that content.

2) Doujinshi are only allowed to exist in Japan due to the fact of how they are released. Doujinshi are released in limited numbers and only during a specific period of time (typically only at an event). This is the absolute reason why it's allowed in Japan. Once you start allowing unlimited quantities of parody doujinshi to be sold, that's when you have a problem.

Bye Fakku
Cya :) hope you will give us a chance one day. Happy new year.

It's too expensive / more expensive than netflix
When netflix first came out with their streaming service, it was pretty terrible you know? You were given one hour of streaming per dollar spent on the monthly subscription. The smallest plan was $16.99 which gave you 17 hours of streaming a month. Keep in mind by this point, netflix had already been operating as a highly successful subscription service for physical discs. By the time they went full digital they had enough subscriptions, and no longer having the cost of physical disc operations, to allow them to reduce the price to $8.99/mo, Which then increased in Oct 2015 to $9.99/mo.

* But it's not the same price as Japan's version.
We are still new. Our team is still small. We have to translate, re-draw sound effects, typeset, prepare for digital distribution, have meetings with the artists to make sure it has their approval, and in some cases having to go back and change things if it doesn't.

All of this takes time. These things are done by our small team of only 10~15 employees.

I only support things that aren't censored or changed for US release.
All our content is uncensored (no black bars, no glowing dicks) and are not changed from their original source material in Japan. We do not change relationships of characters, we do not remove chapters. We strive to make sure our content is on par with Japan.

You are going to lose traffic.
We are aware of this. We knew this since day 1. It's still a necessary step to allowing us to support the artists by providing a legitimate method of consuming their works.

The artists don't really make money.
I can assure you they do and are really shocked that their works are selling outside of Japan. Most artists in Japan are pretty humble and learning that they're popular overseas has a huge impact on them.

Can you allow us to pay with another currency?
I can look into it, but off the top of my head I want to say it's not possible since our bank is based in the US. So a conversation still has to take place. We will have other methods like Bitcoin though, which don't have to worry about such things :)

I want to try before I buy.
We have some ideas about this, but we have to figure it out both logistically and technically.

Guest Passes
I'll bring up the idea during our weekly web team meeting.

I only support artists through scanlations.
I don't know if there's some kind of confusion about scanlations or what but just purely reading scanlations online does not support the artist in Japan financially. Scanlations are produced when someone buys the doujinshi, scans it into a computer, removes the japanese text / cleans the pages, translates the text, and adds english text. Then they zip it and upload it online. The only point in this process where the artist is supported is the initial person (1 person) buying the doujinshi. Even then, most the time this doujinshi was purchased from a third party store who bought it 2nd hand from someone else. Having a digital platform for allowing us overseas to legally support their works allows us to have a constant method of supporting the artist.

FAKKU doesn't read any of our posts / feedback
How am I replying to that post then? ;p we read everything you post on the forums. We take your feedback very very VERY seriously. But when your feedback is "keep scanlations / parody works" we honestly just can't. I'm sorry. I love parody doujinshi as much as the next person but we HAVE to do this to move the industry forward and allow a legitimate method for fans to support the artists in Japan and allow us to work with more companies.

I can't remember my favorites
We have had an export function for favorites for a few months now. We also put out an announcement saying to export before we made the switch. I know some of you may not have seen it though. We will talk about this during our meeting to see if we can maybe come up with a solution. In the meantime, try throwing your favorites url into Wayback Machine on Archive.org.

FAKKU is dead
Actually, it's the beginning of something beautiful. When you buy a book or subscription on FAKKU. A percentage of that cost goes back to the original artists. This allows you, as the fan, to support your favorite artists.

On top of this, we now have the ability to show a lot of artists in Japan that their works are popular and will sell overseas. For the most part, doujinshi artists currently view the rest of the world as a bunch of pirates, who don't want to support them (supporting financially is way different than just saying you like their work). Word is already spreading between artists in Japan that FAKKU gives them the ability to sell their works to the english speaking world. This is great because it gives us the ability to provide you, the fans, with more content.

This is just the beginning. We have a ton of awesome things coming soon :) I can't really go into detail on them right now but major things are happening.

Just so you are aware, many artists that draw R18+ art are doing this work on the side as their personal work. Some of the major 18+ artists out there are actually secretly behind some of the characters designs for major anime / manga series. They use different pen names for their 18+ work.

Being an artist is not a multi-million dollar job by any means.

This decision was not made out of some greed from FAKKU to bath in golden bathtubs despite what many of the people against this decision have claimed. This decision was made to be able to support the artists in Japan who we have been fans of for years. Before we made this decision, there was no legitimate method to support these artists while being an overseas fan. We wanted to bridge that gap and bring 18+ manga to a level of appreciation that both normal anime and manga have. This is an art form too. Just geared toward adults only with stories that deal with things like sex or affairs or emotional issues between partners.

To compare us to PornHub is a little silly. One is a adult streaming service where users are able to upload content (some of quick is illegal and gets removed within 24 hours) and others which are clips by other porn studios. We are a localization publisher which is working with another publisher in Japan who is working with artists who spend months working on a single work.

"Vast over simplification" is just an easy escape line of the truth.

Yeah, piracy probably wont stop because people tolerate piracy. But that only shows how fucked up everything is. If people actually understand what DRM is for in the first place, then they should surely agree. If people stopped pirating in the first place, DRM wont be needed. Its a solution made because there are people stupid enough to make time ripping other people off than actually making use of the time to earn more. So people who actually dont support piracy should actually be pro DRM. It should be just that simple.

I don't support this decision.

Not because I don't want to support artists, but because the people at Fakku aren't doing this for them. The artists make as much money as they ever were with or without this intervention. They draw porn, it's not like they were ever going to become millionaires,and the money going to them is likely less than 10% of subscription fees.

The reason this is happening is because the people at fakku finally realized that there was some money to be had out of this gig, and decided to make themselves look like mirror-polished white-knight cockheads while they did it.

This is not a business enterprise, it's a porn site. You don't see Redtube or Pornhub dicking over their userbase under the false pretense of "Boo hoo we met some people and they said we were taking monies away from them". They do unlicensed porn on a much, much larger scale, and yet they still manage to support themselves by offering subscription access to their best content, as Fakku used to do. I believe that Fakku tried this, and noticed that not many people were actually buying into the subscriptions, so they made them mandatory. I guess a few subscribers is better than none, even if you kill the sites traffic to do it.

You're not humanitarian aid guys, you run a fucking porn site, stop acting like hentai jesus and pull your heads out of your asses.