Manga is more popular than ever. But as the number of readers takes off, hackers are also growing enormously.
With the arrival of the pandemic and the various health measures, the year 2020 was marked by confinements, and therefore, great moments of loneliness, or at least boredom. In order to pass the time during this period of history, many people have turned to forgotten hobbies.
Music, but also film, series or reading. Everyone had time, so it was possible to resume their activities, between two meetings held on Zoom or to occupy a time of technical unemployment. Thus the manga industry has experienced an even more meteoric rise than usual. Indeed, if the world of comics from Japan is doing well, very well, the confinement has had an incredible effect on sales.
But unfortunately, hacks have also never been so numerous. It was indeed difficult to leave home, and people, who are not usual pirates, took the plunge to illegally acquire the last volume of their favorite adventure. Since then, piracy has exploded. To fight against the phenomenon, the ABJ was created. It is the organization in charge of the fight against piracy, an extremely important fight in the Rising Sun archipelago.
A very expensive hack
Because according to the first published figures, the machine is accelerating dangerously. Indeed, in the first months of 2020, traffic to the three main manga piracy sites was around 12 million. Today, there are over 320 million unique visitors.
As a direct consequence of this increase in the number of hacks, the financial shortfall is enormous. Still according to the first estimates of the ABJ, the losses were below 2 billion dollars at the beginning of the year 2020. But today the phenomenon has tripled, and the losses logically exceed 6 billion dollars.
In 2019, the creator and owner of the Manga-Mura site, one of the references in this field, was prosecuted in a real “International manhunt”. If this man was eventually arrested and tried, a new site took the vacant place, Manga Bank. The latter was for a long time the favorite destination of manga pirates, but today it has also been closed by the authorities.
