You got it right! Since each user is paying less per chapter read, you need more subscribers on the service to surpass the revenue that would have been received with a-la-carte only. And there is a huge opportunity to get more subscribers paying to read than there are people paying under the traditional a-la-carte structure due to the much lower barrier to entry. This is exactly how Crunchyroll pushed the anime industry forward where physical sales are mostly downstream from digital subscription services.
We've kept age filtering in mind even before we launched but haven't been able to prioritize it yet even though we agree and want to support it. But we hadn't thought of allowing a guardian to select the things a kid can read which is a wonderful idea! We'll keep that one in mind when we get around to age and content filtering.
For all the titles we have right now, they are available worldwide except within Japan itself so you don't need to worry about restrictions. We plan to keep it that way but are uncertain if Japanese publishers will start restricting this more in the future by dividing up the rights.
Some of it is fear of cannibalizing the traditional print and ebook business, uncertainty of newer strategies, and desire to retain control of their properties.
Which platform are you using? It should already be preloading a few images in advance but maybe we can do a better job on this on a particular platform.
We choose new titles by talking with our publishers to figure out what they have English streaming rights to and what we think fits well in our catalog.
Premium users can send us a message on social media or via our support portal to request series, but we’re considering adding a more dedicated way to send requests.
Searching by author is on the roadmap! We have the metadata so it’s just a matter of integrating that into search.
Yep, we've got deals with six English-language publishers. The conversations have generally been pretty smooth. Most of the publishers we work with are excited to get their series in front of a larger audience through a streaming service.
Thanks for the constant feedback, Daiz, brutally honest as it always is ;)
We're tracking all of the reader issues and feature requests like the ones you mentioned, but of course with a small team handling everything from development to licensing (our five founders are the only employees) we have to be really careful about what we prioritize.
As for image quality, we'll look into the specific issues you mentioned to see if they're present in the source files we get from Kodansha or not.
Re: Kaiten exclusivity, what we can say publicly right now is that our partnership goes deeper than just exclusives, and we're working on some projects that we'll hopefully be able to talk about soon. One visible thing it has helped us do is collaborate with Kaiten on cross-promotions for their titles without worrying that our efforts will push people to competitor services.
In terms of the calendar feature, we put out a release calendar a little while ago! https://www.azuki.co/release-calendar If you have more features you'd like to see from it, just let us know.
Azuki was always intended to be cross-platform. We believed really strongly that web had to be there because it's so accessible via links and search engines. But a lot of manga fans also look for places to read in the app stores, and we have competitors in those stores, so it was important to be able to compete there as well. You're right that cross-platform development is a challenge, but we get a significant share of our readership from Android and iOS, so we think it was the right call. We will continue to improve all platforms and everyone is free to decide when is the right time for them to use Azuki based on the features and content we have available.
This is a really cool idea, thanks for suggesting it! We’ll look into what it takes to build a Tachiyomi plugin and if it can support the terms of our publisher contracts.
Both Crunchyroll and Azuki have Attack on Titan from Kodansha, but Orange is part of a different deal CR has. Sorry about the missing chapters on Grand Blue and some other series! That’s a licensing restriction on Kodansha’s end that we’re doing everything we can to change.
No restrictions on account sharing, and adding profiles a la Netflix is something we can consider down the line. We’re happy to have more people using Azuki and talking about it with their friends :)
Thanks! We’re also really proud of our partnership with smaller publishers like Kaiten Books, Star Fruit Books, and Glacier Bay Books. It’s been great sharing their titles with more fans.
The simulpub model is definitely expensive to run at scale, especially if the localization staff is paid fairly, which is something we believe in very strongly. We’re currently experimenting with some other models as well, including serializing completed series one chapter at a time. There’s a balancing act between quality and speed obviously, and one nice thing about releasing digitally on a streaming service is that we can more easily experiment to find the right balance compared to a print publisher.
All titles on our service are available worldwide outside of Japan and we support payments worldwide by Credit Card on the website and Apple/Google on our mobile apps.
You may like "Blame!" (pronounced BLAM). It's not a similar story at all as it's more hard sci-fi action but may be up your alley. Let me know if you end up liking it.
Unfortunately publishers are not providing the the rights for content to be released in Japan through foreign services like Azuki. If we can make it work, we will.