Nathan Look's blog

Manga is very popular in many Asian countries. Similar to the comics that originated in Rome, they feature hand drawn scenes that follow a storyline. Manga is growing increasingly popular, and in 2007, Japanese publishing company made $3.6 billion in manga sales. There is also a growing number of English speakers who read manga. However, publishers translating manga into English cannot keep up with demand, and consumers are going elsewhere.

Many of them are going to a site called www.mangafox.com, a site that currently stores 6754 different series. The creators of mangafox.com saw that there was excess demand for translated manga, and rounded up teams of volunteer translators to create scanned translations, or scanlations. As Mangafox’s popularity grew, so too did the amount of revenue they generated. Right now, their revenue is approximately $22.7 million per year, and with only a cost of $40 000 to $81500 to run the site, Mangafox is making a substantial amount of money. From almost nothing, they created a site that generates over 40 million page views per day. The creators of Mangafox saw the internet as an innovative way to let people read manga. Instead of storing millions of paper copies, all the manga is stored on huge servers free for everyone to read.

Psyren: Currently the most popular manga on Mangafox.com, with over 7.5 million page views