In an interview with About.com, Crunchyroll CEO, Kun Gao, discusses the company’s future goals with regard to distribution of manga online. Crunchyroll, he says, will be not a publishing partner, but a technology partner to manga publishers.
“Let me clarify exactly what it is we’re trying to do. As you may know, we received a small strategic investment from Bitway about a month or so ago, totaling about $750,000. The reason Bitway is working with Crunchyroll is because we are an Internet company – our core strength is technology. So, we really are working with Bitway not to distribute manga, but to figure out a way to build a platform to enable monetization of manga online.
So what I mean by that is, we’re trying to figure out a distribution platform, to build a platform enabling the digitization, distribution, and monetization of manga. We want to provide these tools to existing local distributors in each region, leverage and use those tools and use the platform to create and enable others to create a business online.”
You can read the full interview at the link above. It’s a little lengthy, but worth checking out. It really is quite amazing what a long way Crunchyroll have come from their inception.
Published: Sep 4, 2010 03:00 pm