Hey guys - some of you may know me from the interviews of community scanlators I posted here. Well this time, a slightly different interview is coming up. Following up after a series of exciting announcements here on FAKKU, here's a slightly more in-depth look into things. Enjoy!
Again, the interview is available in its entirety here. This and previous interviews (some not hentai-related!) are also available on
4playeranimecast.moe.
Just a couple of weeks ago, FAKKU – one of the more well-known hentai online aggregation and digital/physical merchandise sites – decided to create a subscription program based on English h-magazine translations that would be released at the same time as the Japanese version.
Although the market itself may be currently small, this marks a very significant step towards bridging the demands of the overseas fan community and the resources of the Japanese publishers. As such, I immediately requested an interview with the man at the center of the storm, Jacob Grady. He graciously accepted despite his extremely busy schedule at a time of expansion, and a huge shout-out goes to him for sparing some of his time to answer these questions.
In this interview, I focus mainly on the business model FAKKU is aiming for as well as the digital transition of Japanese publishers and the future of aggregation. But enough of my chatter – here it is!
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Is this the “end of the line” for FAKKU? That is, do you see FAKKU using essentially the same business model 5 years from now – digital simultaneous release of translations with physical merchandise (including h-magazine volumes) as novelty goods on the side?
This is only the beginning. We will be expanding the content we provide through the subscription while simultaneously publishing more and more books. I expect us to eventually branch out into games and anime sometime in the future. FAKKU has always been about more than just hentai.
Speaking in a bigger context, is this a viable (if not optimal given the resources) end-game model for the Japanese manga industry? A couple of the big-name publisher-distributors in Japan (Shueisha, Kodansha, etc.) have started to create mobile apps and projects based on free or “freemium” access to their manga. Do they regard this as an inevitability? How does it reconcile with their very public hatred of potential digital piracy? Will the increased number of eyeballs on them be worth it?
I think companies that embrace the current situation of the industry outside of Japan will succeed. Customers want to be able to read manga and watch anime at the same time people in Japan do, whichever model achieves that first (freemium, subscription, etc) will win. I don’t necessarily think a service needs to be freemium to succeed – the reason we read scanlations is not because we don’t want to pay, it’s because there is no way to read it legally and without a delay.
With regards to the hesitance of Japanese publishers to put stuff abroad and at a cost more comprehensible to Western readers, there have been (understandably) complaints directed towards everything under the Sun – niche market with a lack of good data or even profitable audience for small-scale ventures since the mid-2000s (e.g.: Oricon only included manga sales since 2008), restrictive international publishing issues and/or outsourcing problems (which would be exacerbated for hentai), digital piracy, a perceived conservative Japanese publishing culture, and more. What were the top two biggest problems you faced in convincing publishers to agree to this project?
The biggest problem we faced was convincing publishers and artists that there was a market outside of Japan. We had to show them that there were people who wanted to support what they were doing. Once we were able to do that, the rest was easy. In the United States we have had to convince people that the content was worth paying for, and we’ve tackled that by making incredibly high quality books and digital releases. The quality of our releases in some cases is even better than what is available in Japan.
In the past couple of years, there have been much more severe crackdowns on community sites and aggregation sites. Was this a major driving factor behind FAKKU’s decision to become “semi-legitimate”? Or did you have a much more proactive stance before a lot of these incidents started to happen?
Yes – that was one of the driving factors that led us to where we are today. I always wanted to work with companies in Japan to make their content available in English but never had the means to reach out to them. What kicked everything off was receiving a takedown notice (and accompanying legal threat) from the largest hentai publisher in Japan. That opened the door to working together. Before that we had been working with many different publishers outside of Japan, but hadn’t had the opportunity to do something on our own.
Like it or not, FAKKU is now competing for a part of the audience that wants to read Comic X-Eros’/Comic Kairakuten’s manga alongside fan translators who may offer it for free with an unknown time tradeoff. However, you are staying as a general aggregation site while offering premium “simul-release” services to just those artists/publishers you have a deal with. What is your current personal view on digital piracy of these manga and the fan translation community? Does it differ from FAKKU’s general objectives? Does FAKKU plan on aggressively extending to as many places as possible to eventually create a unified, premium-only service, or will subscriptions stay as a time-saving alternative product to fan translation + free aggregate sites?
Before the end of 2015, we will be removing all scanlations from FAKKU. After that, the website will be entirely based off of licensed content. Until then, we are focused on our current offerings, which are Comic Kairakuten and Comic X-Eros. We will absolutely expand from there to pick up more magazines and increase the value of having a FAKKU subscription. I no longer consider us as a competitor to other scanlation websites, especially since we plan to remove all unlicensed content from FAKKU by the end of the year.
What percent of FAKKU’s employees have remote jobs? If there are a significant number of remote jobs, how do you deal with decentralization in such a recent and volatile field?
We’re about 50/50 with remote/local employees and in total I think we have 15 full-time employees. Doing something like this would not have been possible 5-10 years ago, but today it is incredibly easy to work back and forth with our partners in Japan and our team members around the world. So we haven’t ran into any problems there.
With regards to the effect of more effectively globalizing sales for Japanese artists that have a contract with you (and potentially other similar companies), do you believe that this will have an overall healthier effect on the industry? The people you have premium-only access to, understandably, are artists who will make a profit (even if at the start people might buy whatever’s on the site) off of the sales. What is your opinion on potentially increasing this inequality in a niche area that is already extremely top-heavy?
What we are doing has already had a hugely positive impact on the industry in and outside of Japan. You are already seeing other publishers attempt to match the quality of our releases and offer the things we do (high quality DRM free downloads, uncensored art, etc etc). Inside Japan, the artists get to see what is popular and what people are supporting in English, which influences what they choose to work on. And we are able to bring artists over from Japan to meet their fans here.
One of the important parts of the magazines we are simul-publishing is that we are not favoring any artists over any others. We have decided to translate the entire magazine and offer it as a package, so all the artists inside (popular artists, newcomers, etc) get equal visibility.
Although these international projects and subscriptions may increase the ratio of people who will pay for the product, it may not have a significant effect on the actual numbers of the audience, which are still small. Does FAKKU and the companies it has contracts with plan on doing anything beyond word-of-mouth and reaching out to other niche communities (such as speedrunning), or are you guys more or less set on waiting for a cultural/generational shift?
We are focused on convincing users who are already fans of hentai that we have created a service worth paying for. And we can do that by showing them how involved the artists are and by offering something that they can’t get anywhere else. Once we’ve convinced them we’ll start thinking about new customers.
Do you think that centralization/aggregation is healthy for the fan community/readers at large? Should organizations that exist now (e.g.: ANN, private torrenting sites, popular content creators) work towards centralization?
I actually do think it’s healthy for the community. Scanlation and fansubbing rose to popularity because the demand was not being met outside of Japan. Really people just want to read and watch things right away because they are fans, the majority of people aren’t reading scanlations to hurt the companies in Japan. Once a service is created that gives customers what they want they will absolutely support it (Crunchyroll and FAKKU are a good example).
What is your ideal scenario for FAKKU one year down the road in terms of becoming an agency?
Ideally we’ll continue as we have been, slowly growing and releasing more and more content. I could not be happy with where we are at right now.
Thanks for the interview! Any shoutouts, callouts, plugs, etc.?
Buy some books!
https://www.fakku.net/books
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