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AnimeGround – Anime Direct Download Site Review

animeground.jpg

I’ve never really felt the need to sign up for a direct download anime site before. Bittorrent does just fine, and I don’t really like the thought of people actually profiting from fansubs. One of these sites, called AnimeGround, set up an account for me to try out, so I figured what the heck?

I should probably get a few things out of the way before actually getting to the review. This is a paid post. AnimeGround is paying me $50 to write this. Am I a sellout? Maybe. But the thing is, the review doesn’t necessarily have to be positive.

So I was trying to think of the best way to handle this. I could’ve just rejected their offer and been fine with that. But why do that when they’re going to pay me? And I can write whatever I want? As long as I’m still being true to myself, and not selling out, I don’t really have a problem with this. So here’s my honest review:

AnimeGround seems like your typical direct download site. You pay a monthly fee of $9.95 which entitles you to unlimited downloads of the anime, j-drama, and manga in their database. All of the downloads are from fansub groups. Yes, all of the stuff that is on AnimeGround is available from your friendly neighborhood fansubber. They have quite a bit of stuff, ranging from new to very old. Like they have the first season of Rizelmine, which was out in 2002, I believe.

Regarding their selection, it’s sad to find that they have a bunch of licensed anime available. For example, they have Kodocha, which I just did a DVD review of… One of the things about (legit (well, relatively legit)) fansubbers is that they stop fansubbing when an anime series is licensed and they stop distribution. When a site like AnimeGround offers these files anyway, they go against the original intentions of the fansubber: to promote new anime, not to replace the commercial distribution of it. Not only that, they profit from it. At least, I assume they must if they’re able to pay me to write bad reviews for them…

I downloaded a few (unlicensed) anime just to check the download speeds. They vary from good (like 400kbs sometimes) to bad (like 50kbs). I think it all depends on the load of the server at any given time. The site itself is pretty ugly looking. It’s all very spartan and does the job, but it won’t win any designer awards any time soon.

So I have a lot of issues with AnimeGround. Not particularly with their actual service, I suppose, but with their existence in general. These “for profit” download sites make all anime fansubs seem less legitimate and hurt the overall state of anime. The anime industry and anime fansubbers have generally coexisted together somewhat peacefully, but these sites make the landscape look a lot more hostile.

I should note that I don’t have a problem with fansubs themselves. I’ll probably end up buying the special editions of the Haruhi Suzumiya DVD. Not because of their awesome marketing campaigns (though Patricia Ja Lee in a bunnysuit wouldn’t hurt), but because I enjoyed the series when I saw it on fansubs first. I watch fansubs, but I also spend money on anime to support the North American industry. Heck, I even buy import stuff sometimes to support the Japanese industry!

It might seem at first glance that these direct download sites might be a “safer” way for people to download anime as opposed to a p2p method. I don’t really think this is the case. A site like this is sure to be shut down sooner or later, and when they do, they’ll have user access logs, along with credit card numbers and/or paypal accounts. Do you think a company that profits from fansubbers would think twice about privacy concerns?

For the reasons outlined above, I cannot recommend AnimeGround. In fact, I recommend you don’t use it.

And for those of you wondering what I’ll use the $50 for writing this review on, I can think of something that I recently bought that cost exactly $50. Yup. Anime.

21 replies on “AnimeGround – Anime Direct Download Site Review”

I’m actually impressed with the level of tact you display here – if I’d been writing this (which I probably wouldn’t anyway – I earn enough not to particularly care about $50 ^^;) I’d probably include a few more choice swears. I really can’t stomach groups like this.

I pay $6 a month or $15 for 3 months, to a different site, an FTP site. They have some drama and a lot of unlicensed anime and they also put up the new fans subs every day. If I want something that isn’t licensed I just need post the bit torrent file on their forum and usually it is ready to download the next day. I live in the US and my download speeds are usally 500-600 Kbs a friend in Europe says she averages around 150 Kbs.
At $5 a month I don’t feel that I’m paying for fansubs rather I’m paying for the bandwidth, am I naive?

@kevn57: I guess you could make an argument that you’re paying for the bandwidth, but the site is obviously making a profit on the fansubs, which is what I have a problem with. I say obviously because they can afford to pay for reviews. The site I reviewed has some kind of unmetered bandwidth plan, so I assume anything after the fees for that they pocket.

I pay enough for bandwidth as it is (Comcast). If paying for the convenience is worth it to you, I guess that’s fine. I just find it unnecessary.

I say obviously because they can afford to pay for reviews.

@Hung the site I download from doesn’t pay for reviews in fact I didn’t mention the name because I don’t know if the site op wants it spread around. I agree that paying for fansubs is a bad bad idea. The ones on eBay should be shot.

@kevn57 Ah, I guess I’m pigeonholing all of them into one huh? I guess I can’t really imagine a not-for-profit one of these services, but maybe they could exist.

Wow, those guys at AnimeGround must be regretting this right now. I think any righteous anime blogger would have done the same thing, I know I would. Anyway, fansub profit groups just make me sick, and the fact that there are actually people paying and supporting these groups just make me sicker.

@Hung email me if you want and I’ll send you a link to the site I’m on and you can check it out for yourself. You don’t have to pay to see what is available and their is a test file to download to check out what your typical download speed would be and you can of course look around the forums there to see what the users are saying. If your interested.

I don’t agree with paying to download fansubs, so I’m not trying to defend the site or the principle it’s based on.

However… as for offering licensed stuff to download, I’ve no problems with that. Just because something is licensed in the US it doesn’t become more available for people who don’t live in the US but in, say, a small Central-European country. Me, I buy US releases of anime when I have some money to spare (even though I’m in a R2 region), and the only reason I don’t buy Japanese releases is that they’re just painfully expensive (I stick to manga). Still, importing anime is just too expensive for me to condemn people who share fansubs of licensed anime. Yeah, I may be hurting the NA anime industry by downloading them, but frankly, I’m not losing sleep over that.

I am under the impression that packages that state “unlimited bandwidth” (not sure if unmetered bandwidth refers to the same thing) means that you can transfer unlimited amount of files without being subjected to transfer capping or speed throttling past a certain point.

The subscriber still needs to pay for the additional bandwidth.

@Zima: Quote from the site: “All our servers are hosted on dedicated servers with unmetered dedicated bandwidth.” This means they’re stuck with a certain throughput, but the bandwidth fee they pay for is not based on actual transfer.

to think ALL fansubbed animes have the following sentence: “This is a free Fansubbed anime. Not for sale or rent.”

Therefore, you can call all fansubs group available and take illegal action against such evil organization..

if its for the band width, i would say this: “damn it…have some patience for ur BT to download…and its free..”

I don’t understand the idea that this is paying for fansubs. You’re not paying for fansubs, you’re paying for someone else to collect them for you, and to have them all easily downloadable from the same location. You could use BT, obviously, but you would most likely end up having to wait half a day (at least) to download the first episode in a series, just to see if you are interested or not. Naturally, if the series is recent and popular, BT is pretty painless, but this is definitely not the case with the majority of fansubbed series. I have no problem paying $9 or so for someone else to collect the large amount of anime that this place does, and then to be able to download any of them painlessly.

Again, you’re not paying for the fansubs. You’re paying for the transport method.

Hung, I wrote a review on this site as well and I just got a comment from DS that brings up a really good point.

He says: “…but don’t you think that by accepting their offer, you and Hung are giving publicity to a group that’s profiting from fansubs?”

I wrote up something in response to his comment but I wanted to hear your take on this as well. What do you think?

@scott: I thought about that myself, but nowhere in my post did I actually link to their site, and if I did, I would’ve added a rel=”nofollow” to it in order to not help their pagerank.

They say any publicity is good publicity. But I don’t really agree with that, especially since I gave them a pretty harsh review.

Yeah, I noticed. I think if people are willing to type it in, they totally mean business anyway.

Hi,

So what do you guys recommend me to do then when I want
an older manga like JAPAN or KING OF WOLVES from Buronson and
Kentaro Miura. I can buy them and pay twice as much. But then
I have another problem. I still don’t have the manga on my laptop.
So then I have to scan every page myself. Seems a little bit
expensive and troublesome to me.
I really don’t want to support them in making money of the fansubs.
So if anyone of you have a better idea for me then PLEASE let me
know.

Thanks,

Dennis

right now i am subscribed to animeground and it is worth it they have really good speeds i get 1.20mb/s per download wich is crazy
they might not have a really active forum but they have alot of anime for download and i like that it might not be the best looking site but it seems fine to me but this is just my opinion

Really awesome site, when i had adsl before, bittorent aint that easy, downloading animes, i’ve got fiber now, but its still a really great site though. I find the downloads really fast, faster than i’m getting from direct connect. and they always have the newest animes available.

i’m going to keep subscribing to them forever, thats for sure.

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