Has The Anime Industry Changed Online Since KissAnime Was Shutdown?

KissAnime shutdown on August 15th 2020. It was a morning (if you were in the UK) you’ll never forget.

The anime community was so shocked KissAnime started trending on Twitter with 100’s of thousands of Tweets.

It’s almost October 2020 now and the conversation has died down a lot.

During the shutdown fans talked about legal sites like Crunchyroll, while some voice actors went on a “moral” rampage of how pirating anime is the devil.

But has anything really changed?

Let’s talk about it.

 

What the data says

According to Google Trends, Crunchyroll is the dominant trend between:

• GoGoAnime
• KissAnime
• Funimation
• 9Anime

This is within the last 30 days.

KissAnime is still surprisingly ahead of Funimation though for popularity.

GoGoAnime (another pirate) is almost on par with Crunchyroll, and seems to have shot up in the last 30 days.

Analyzing website traffic

KissAnime’s traffic dropped massively to 54M by the end of August 2020. Which is expected.

Remember – before August 2020, KissAnime’s traffic was over 100M+.

Let’s compare that to Crunchyroll and Funimation.

 

Funimation‘s traffic barely moved (estimated), but Crunchyroll‘s grew so much it surpassed KissAnime.

Could this be an indication to fans being driven to legal sites? Maybe. A portion of it could be.

Let’s look at some more anime pirates.

 

 

9Anime has reached 40M+. So it’s grown since KissAnime’s piracy doom, gloom, and shutdown happened.

GoGoAnime TV grew to 27M+. But their biggest domain – GoGoAnime Movie has 225M+ visitors PER MONTH.

All this (most) was achieved in August 2020. 

Looking at it from this data, it’s clear the anime industry is in the same bucket it started in.

The only difference now is some traffic has shifted away to:

• Crunchyroll
• 9Anime
• GoGoAnime

Since KissAnime’s shutdown. With the rest going towards sites like Funimation.

But anime piracy and the problems with it are still the same. If not worse since GoGoAnime has even more estimated traffic than KissAnime ever managed to achieve.

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What do you think?

Once January 2021 comes around (for Japan) piracy will change a lot. But whether the impact is big enough is another question.

 

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