We all are aware by now that the pirated anime and manga websites KissAnime and KissManga were attacked by Japan's officials last weekend and the sites were shut for good. Let’s be honest, we weren’t ready for this. The whole world was shunned as the site’s owner posted in their discord group that they will no longer be continuing the websites. We all felt like something important was taken from us and it felt personal. And honestly, most of us don’t know where to find Anime for free. While the competitors are feeling happy that the sites were taken down, hardcore fans still mourn the loss of their favourite sites. I wanted to check how everyone around is holding up as I still recover from the loss of KissAnime.
Recently ANN surveyed their readers on their opinion on the closure of the site and found out that the support for the sites was actually higher in India and Southeast Asia than the USA. This could be because India and Southeast Asian countries don’t have the luxury of a huge library of Anime on Netflix or Crunchyroll. There are about 120 shows offered on Crunchyroll in India with 160 on Netflix and about 30 through Amazon Prime. As for Southeast Asia, Aniplus-Asia airs on cable television and has a companion streaming service offering about 250 titles. All of these numbers are negligible and puny when compared to titles offered in the U.S. as there are more than 1,000 shows available on Crunchyroll stateside. And when you consider KissAnime's massive catalogue, you can see why fans flocked to its impressive roster. So we depend more on Pirated sites than people from the USA.
However, according to the survey, A huge 64.27% of respondents in India were extremely sad or angry about the closure whereas only 33.89% of respondents in the USA said they were angry or sad. The survey also found out 67% of Malaysian respondents were sad or angry while the numbers dropped to 37.62% in the Philippines.
The SimilarWeb website analysis of KissAnime showed the site received a whopping 95.08 million visitors in the past six months out of which 26.52% was received from the USA, 12.6% from the Philippines and 5.85% from India. For a country which is still in its early stages of getting to know anime, we Indians provided 5.85% of traffic to one of the biggest pirated anime sites. That is pretty impressive if you ask me.
Like I said before the competitors must be happy that this event led to an increase in traffic on their websites. Some were so happy that they even celebrated in joy.
Yatta Tachi's owner Katty Castillo said on twitter that the site's traffic doubled before the noon of Monday, the day after KissAnime was shutdown.
Matthew Czubakowski who runs the 'because.moe' search engine for legal anime steaming services told ANN that the site also temporarily seen as much as double of their usual traffic.
We all are finding alternatives for KissAnime and KissManga. There are few replacements for these sites that we’re trying out and we will make a list of anime websites with a good library that we can watch for free. For more updates, please stay tuned on otakuintown.com
Source: ANN, Katy Castillo's Twitter Account
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