Shogakukan is one of Japan’s biggest publishers, but they’re losing huge amounts of money to piracy. However, it seems that they’re fighting back now because they’re launching a new anti-piracy campaign. They call this campaign “NO! Piracy & Illegal Website”, which seeks to make people go for legal manga options rather than pirate sites.

For the campaign, Shogakukan will be posting announcements about pirate sites via 23 of their manga magazines. They will also announce them in their various digital manga hubs as well. By promoting these legal options, they may encourage readers to go for them more and reject pirated versions. Now, these pirate sites make money through ad revenue, which in turn are based off views. By having less people viewing these sites, Shogakukan aims to exhaust the websites’ ad revenues.

The campaign also stated that last autumn, there was a “rapid increase” in people using pirate sites. And because of this, they threatened the legal digital sales of their manga. The campaign also reported that just one illegal manga site alone costed the company over four billion yen in profits. Remember, that’s just one site, and if they add them together, the company’s losses are much larger. The effects of this would be so bad that it may affect the manga industry as a whole. This may also affect the mangaka who still haven’t made a name for themselves and struggle to make a profit. Many mangaka make profit through royalties from the sales of their manga. However, pirate sites deny them these profits as those who read pirated manga online for free won’t likely pay for that manga which they’ve already read. Unless they’re big-time mangaka with long-running franchises like One Piece or Naruto, this would certainly cost the small-timers a lot of money.

Shogakukan has now launched their first announcement last 4th June via Big Comic Spirits. They’re aiming to make more announcements about their campaign through their other magazines.

Source: Anime! Anime!