Thread: Read this if you care about animeonline

STOP USING ANIMEONLINE.NET! READ BELOW TO KNOW WHY!

Just read some disturbing things about our benevolent 'new owners'.

They are the same people who run the website "Mangafox", otherwise known as the most popular online Manga reader on the net, rumored to rake in $3,200 a day in Ad revenue.

And then Trunks linked me a thread posting from Baka-Updates: Baka-Updates Manga - Viewing Topic - A Tale of Two Manga Readers

Originally Posted by cmertb

Many know of a certain online manga reader named mangafox.com, which is owned by a certain New York-based company named NOEZ. It's the most popular manga reader currently, and it is estimated to rake in about 3,200 USD in ad revenue every single DAY. www.mangafox.com estimated worth and web stat from Cubestat This is a fine business model, because what they sell is FREE labor of countless scanlation groups which they use without asking for permission. Their site is run by numerous volunteer uploaders, administrators, moderators who also all work for FREE in the name of the community. Really, the only thing NOEZ has to pay for is hosting, which is only a fraction of the revenue. Nice profit margin, isn't it? But I guess Jacky Yung does need to maintain a certain lifestyle.

But overall, Mangafox is a nice site that says they respect scanlator's wishes. If a scanlator group wishes for their content to be removed from mangafox.com, they comply. Well, except when the manga is popular enough to make a significant dent in the $3200 daily revenue, in that case, too bad, you greedy scanlator. Or scanlators can request that their releases are posted on Mangafox with a delay. And Mangafox will comply... well, again, except if the manga is popular enough to have impact on the Mangafox revenue. But otherwise, it's a fine honest scanlator-friendly site.

But then, there's a bad apple among online manga readers named mangahere.com. Definitely nothing like the upstanding Mangafox. They don't respect the scanlators at all. They host any manga they feel like. They don't honor any delay periods. They take beautiful images that people have put so much work into and haphazardly slap their own watermarks on them, as if they're the ones who produced them. They take out scanlator credit pages to hide the fact that someone else worked on the manga. Then, to rub it in, they claim on their Facebook pages that they're the ones who translate the manga, rather than the scanlators they steal from. Clearly, they're a terrible site that's completely different from Mangafox, which respects scanlators (sometimes).

That's what I thought, but there were some misgivings. For example, why do ads for Mangahere appear on Mangafox, if they're supposed to be competitors? Why did these two unrelated sites share the same Google Analytics account for a while? In order to dispel these slanderous rumors, I decided to check the domain registration information. As expected, mangafox.com is registered to Noez Work, 1133 Broadway Suite 706 New York, New York 10010, and the admin is Yung, Jacky mangafox.com website - server info, stats, DNS, IP, popular keywords - faqs.org Websites But what about the dastardly mangahere.com? It's registered to Noez Work, 1133 Broadway Suite 706 New York, New York 10010 United States, and the technical contact is... Yung, Jacky jacky@noez.com Whois Lookup | Domain Availability - Registration Information Wait, what's going on here? Does this mean that NOEZ only pretends to respect scanlators on Mangafox, and then turns around and rips them off blind on Mangahere to make up for lost revenue on Mangafox? Who can we trust anymore? My world is upside down...

The GODaddy registrar information has since been set to private, to hide who the owners are, and the WHOIS for animeonline.net has as well (In the case of Mangahere and Animeonline, the changes were a mere week or so apart, and coincide with the current changes taking place here on AO).

Then I read a post by Asa from earlier this month:

Originally Posted by Asa

Your site was bought by NOEZ if i'm right, a Chinese media company who also owns mangafox.com and otakuzone.com. You are now the Forum for animehere.com, the former zomganime.com.
Strange thing is there is no sign of NOEZ as a Company on any of those sites, like it was before. And noez.com isn't working for me anymore.

Zomg was bought by this Company a few years ago, they changed the mainsite without asking us what we thought about it, since we were "only" the forum staff but also former mainsite staff.
They took away most of the Admin rights, so we couldn't really change the Forum anymore. They sent one of them into the Forum as Admin so we had some sort of Person to speak to, but
he was useless and couldn't get things done. And now they changed the link from animehere to your forum, while i guess ours will be deleted (site expires 2.2.2013) and obviously not renewed.

Just imagine this Company as some sort of Internet - Borg

If you have any questions just ask, also i would like to speak to someone who is in "charge" here

Judging from the unscrupulous tactics employed by NOEZ on Mangafox and Mangahere, what happened to the websites mentioned by Asa, I cannot let this stand.

While there is nothing I can do for Animeonline.net, the site is owned by someone else and I deffinatly don't have the money change that (and believe me, I would if I did.), the only thing I can do is emplore you not to support this site anymore.

By using it you are giving Ad revenue to the charlatans who run this site.

Animeonline once was a site ran for the Anime Community for the Anime Community. This is no longer the case.

But you do have an Alternative: In February I started a new community called Otakuzen.com.

Otaku Zen is run in the same manner as AnimeOnline used to be run before it was bought by NOEZ. The staff who currently run AO are the Same staff who run OZ. If you go there, you will be greeted by exactly as you would here. But there is a Difference.

You would be using a website run by someone who actually cares about Anime, not some no-faced Chinese media firm.

Please, I emplore you, stop using Animeonline.net. By doing so you are supporting a company that is exploiting free work from its staff for monetary gain.

Please follow the link in my signature to Otakuzen.com, and Discover your Inner Otaku!