According to a new report, though Crunchyroll purchased online anime merchandise retailer Right Stuf with the objective of strengthening their own operations, the acquisition has since proven less-than-profitable thanks to their parent company Sony’s ongoing turn to puritanism.
The dominoes that led to this outcome first began to fall in August 2021 when, after roughly two-years of negotiations and a full-blown anti-trust probe from the U.S. Justice Department, Sony completed their purchase of Crunchyroll from then-parent company AT&T for an impressive total of $1.175 Billion.
A year later, Crunchyroll announced that, in service of bolstering their “eCommerce offerings”, they had acquired the aforementioned Right Stuf – and though they told customers that they would “continue to provide the same wide variety of products we have been offering for 35 years”, this assurance came with a notable caveat, as the combined entities subsequently announced that “as part of our new Right Stuf + Crunchyroll unification we will be phasing out the Erotica genre content and product.”
From there, September 2023 saw Sony officially collapse Right Stuf’s retail operations into Crunchyroll proper, thus making their online storefronts one in the same.
And while Sony ostensibly saw their decision to drop said risqué merchandise as a way to entice wider audiences of non-anime fans into shopping with Crunchyroll, it seems the entire endeavor has ultimately backfired on them.
This outcome was first brought to public attention on December 20th courtesy of Bloomberg‘s Cecilia D’Anastasio and Takashi Mochizuki, who themselves had reportedly learned the relevant information via personal interviews conducted with “18 current and former [Crunchyroll] employees.”
Per their sources, the Sony-owned anime streaming service is currently struggling to both retain paying customers, with their monthly customer turnover rates sitting upwards of 8.5%” and capture the attention of viewers, with a cited survey “of over 4,000 Americans [conducted] earlier this year by the online gaming and entertainment site Polygon” noting that “76% of Gen Z anime fans watch shows on Netflix, compared with 58% on Crunchyroll.”
These sources also informed the pair of reporters that Crunchyroll’s purchase of Right Stuf was meant to help their ‘identity crisis’, as “executives also hoped merchandising would help retain subscribers and boost revenue.”
“Viewers could binge on manga comic books between anime seasons instead of pausing their monthly fee or purchase collectible figures of their favorite anime characters,” they explained. “After taking over the anime merchandise retailer Right Stuf for an undisclosed sum in 2022, Crunchyroll’s online store was poised to offer manga, DVDs and toys.”
Unfortunately, three former employees admitted that instead, “the business has shrunk since the acquisition”, with various reasons said to have contributed to this result, most notably the fact that “Sony asked Crunchyroll to pull the racier adult manga and toys that formed about 5% of Right Stuf’s revenue.”
As of writing, neither Sony nor Crunchyroll have offered any specific comment on either the financial costs of their puritanism nor any of the other revelations found within D’Anastasio and Mochizuki’s article, with the only official communication from either being a standard PR statement given in response to Bloomberg’s request for comment.
“There’s never been a more exciting time to be an anime fan, and we are strategically feeding a pipeline of anime content and experiences that fuels that fandom, deepens the love of anime, and exposes more audiences to the medium,” wrote the anime distributor. “The Crunchyroll business is outperforming our financial expectations, and the company is well positioned to continue to grow alongside the rising global demand for anime.”