Culture Flying Colors Foundation scandal - Why you shouldn't trust anime youtubers

So there's something happening now called the Flying Colors Foundation scandal .
http://goboiano.com/the-short-life-of-flying-colors-foundation/

Their (archived) website: http://web.archive.org/web/20180318183234/https://flyingcolorsfoundation.org/#contactus

TL;DR/DW:
>Flying Colors Foundation is a supposedly non-profit foundation that claims it's going to help "Western anime fans to be heard"
>The future founder of FCF meets up with Gigguk in the summer of 2017
>One month later The Anime Man releases his "Top 100 anime survey", the group behind the foundation (still not officially launched) contacts him because they see a business opportunity
>They collaborate with him and help him analyze and publish the data
>It did well *dollar signs in their eyes*
>The company officially registers sometime in November
>One day they put out a survey called the The 2018 Anime Census
>Big anime youtubers shill for it (all for free, they claim, later on it turns out they were all paid):

>One week later a woman called Alicia Haddick/socialanigirl posts an article on Medium (sadly it appears to have been removed), pointing out that one of the staff members of the foundation used to work for Loot Crate and Disney as Consumer Insight and Data Analyst
>Some people start suspecting it's a scam and that it was made for the sole purpose of data harvesting and selling analytics to companies
>Connections between Gigguk and one of the founders are also found
>Concerns are also raised about the lack of team transparency, intrusive census questions about mental health and income, and questionable donated profits
>FCF also promise to donate their profits to other non-profits but also claim that they will donate to a for-profit company, it's illegal for a non-profit to give revenue they earned through donations or other non-taxable income to a for-profit company so this is clearly suspicious
>FCF damage control and deny it's a scam, same goes for people like Gigguk and The Anime Man
>Alicia Haddick/socialanigirl releases another article exposing more of their lies (http://web.archive.org/web/20180328...s-foundation-further-revelations-dc43b9e8a8b9 , such as:
– Having more employed individuals than publicly known (including a potentially illegal unpaid intern)
– The staff claiming to have no more connections with Otaku Pin Club while some still have admin privileges on the OPC Discord server
– They considered the possibility of charging Japanese clients for a more in-depth analysis of the gathered data. They also did not represent themselves as a non-profit with these clients
– The survey management tool they used collected IP addresses despite FCF themselves stating that no personal data will be gathered
– Despite claiming to have not paid influencers, they paid Digibro $100 for their first consultation
>BURN BABY BURN https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/87kja1/flying_colors_foundation_lied_about_the_people/
>Gigyuk starts distancing himself from the company, The Scammer Man goes even further by sweeping it all under the rug, he deletes the video and the tweets where he promoted the survey etc (they were the anime youtubers who were the most involved in the project)
>FCF admit defeat and close down on March 31 https://flyingcolorsfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Farewell-Letter-FCF.pdf

Big tl;dr: Private Info of weeboos got leaked to one, two, or maybe thousands of scam companies.

 

[BILLY MAYS]

Are you shitting me? How could no one figure out this was a scam just from this stupid mission statement?

we're talking about retarded weebs here

 

[Chiang Kai-shek]

Demolition D+ was the only good anime youtube reviewer out there.

 

[Tranhuviya]

Mr. Anime is the only good anime youtuber.

 

[polonium]

All annimu everything is shut

 

[RodgerDodger]

Here’s the sad thing in all of this. In spite of how slimy it may feel on the surface an outfit like FYF would likely be a huge boon for the North American anime fans. See here’s the problem with North American fans of Japanese products and media have. The Japanese producers don’t know who they are. They have no reliable or granular data on them. They don’t know who, where, how many, how much. So without concrete data they don’t plan for them. All of their thoughts and planning are based exclusively on their Japanese and Asian consumers. North America is at best an unexpected happy accident when it hits. Bandai is notorious for this with their upper end toy products such as their Soul of Chogokin line.

But with actual North American customer data the producers have what they need to evaluate the risk and factor and produce for the North American consumers. It gives them the tools they need to directly market their product and grow it within the new market space. So yeah someone providing them anime consumer data is in fact a net positive for an8me fans. Not that paranoid autistic Weeabo’s would ever understand that.

 

[XYZpdq]

As far as I've ever heard Japanese execs give no fucks about what American consumers want or expect, even when specifically planning USA releases of things.

Does Japan even do "fan movement" shit? I thought that was looked down upon by companies there.

 

[Audit]

Japanese companies don't really care about Western consumers one way or another because it's far too niche of a market outside of Japan. If you're buying merchandise, it's coming from an importer or trading company, not the manufacturer. Even in Japan, the whole industry is pretty niche, and is kept afloat by a small number of autistic nerds with way too much money. (That same consumer type exists in the west too, but they go on /tg/ and not /a/) The money there is generated pretty evenly between discs and merchandise- the merchandise is expensive like in outside countries, but so are the discs. Whereas $50 would get you the whole season on Bluray in the US from a licensing company like Funimation (which is still overpriced), the same amount in Japan would get you a disk with 2 episodes on it. You being a basement-dwelling otaku with fat stacks of yen would buy the whole 24 episode disc set for $600, of course. Then you'd spend another few hundred for your plastic shit. Those are the consumers that matter in the industry, and it's why the Western market hardly matters at all.

This is probably one of the biggest problems with the profitability of anime as a whole right now. American television shows can make a profit because they're designed to bring in an incredibly large number of views and make money off of ads and streaming deals. You never have to sell a single piece of merchandise to make a profit. You only have to make sure that a ton of people watch your show through the approved, i.e. not piracy, channels. The same can't really be said about anime. With 12-24 shows a season, is it really reasonable to expect any sort of viewership for a niche interest that already has problems attracting an audience? Honestly, the industry will probably just fade away unless they can produce some new hits that see mass-market appeal.

 

[From The Uncanny Valley]

This is probably one of the biggest problems with the profitability of anime as a whole right now. American television shows can make a profit because they're designed to bring in an incredibly large number of views and make money off of ads and streaming deals. You never have to sell a single piece of merchandise to make a profit. You only have to make sure that a ton of people watch your show through the approved, i.e. not piracy, channels. The same can't really be said about anime. With 12-24 shows a season, is it really reasonable to expect any sort of viewership for a niche interest that already has problems attracting an audience? Honestly, the industry will probably just fade away unless they can produce some new hits that see mass-market appeal.

Plus a lot of anime programs seem to be aimed at very disturbed people, just look at the moe trend.

 

[CWCchange]

Japanese companies don't really care about Western consumers one way or another because it's far too niche of a market outside of Japan. If you're buying merchandise, it's coming from an importer or trading company, not the manufacturer. Even in Japan, the whole industry is pretty niche, and is kept afloat by a small number of autistic nerds with way too much money. (That same consumer type exists in the west too, but they go on /tg/ and not /a/) The money there is generated pretty evenly between discs and merchandise- the merchandise is expensive like in outside countries, but so are the discs. Whereas $50 would get you the whole season on Bluray in the US from a licensing company like Funimation (which is still overpriced), the same amount in Japan would get you a disk with 2 episodes on it. You being a basement-dwelling otaku with fat stacks of yen would buy the whole 24 episode disc set for $600, of course. Then you'd spend another few hundred for your plastic shit. Those are the consumers that matter in the industry, and it's why the Western market hardly matters at all.

B-but, muh production committees with Crunchyroll at the table!

But yeah, most money overseas trickles down to pennies when it comes to the people weeaboos believe get their money. That's business at its finest, regardless where or what. Even in Japan, companies usually break even with Blu-ray/DVD sales, and later profit comes from initial licensing deals for merchandise instead of royalties.

Demolition D+ was the only good anime youtube reviewer out there.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=-2lVi-SeIx0

Yeah, but he's a fat neckbeard, has shit taste, and got boring fast as well.

Does Japan even do "fan movement" shit? I thought that was looked down upon by companies there.

Yes, and a lot of it takes autism to the extreme.