

I usually read manga from online readers, specifically MangaPanda.

Am I contributing to a mangaka's income by reading from such websites? Are
they licensed to distribute them online?


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question
resources mangaka
When I use online manga readers, does the mangaka get any income from it?


The short answer is _no_. Most manga readers you find out there are all third-
party aggregators (therefore not licensed to distribute the manga in any form)
that take fan made scanlations and host them on their respective sites. They
make money from the ad revenue they receive from the traffic other sites. In
other words, they take the hard work of others (specifically, the work
original authors and artist, along with the volunteer efforts of the
scanlators) and profit without doing any work themselves.

There are aggregators out there such as Batoto that maintain a certain quality
standard such as not resizing, downsampling, watermarking scanlations, or
scrape content from other scanlators or sites. They also respect the wishes of
scanlators that don't allow aggregators or have rules on delayed releases.
Even in doing so they are not officially licensed to deliver their content,
while they do try to maintain a standard of quality, none of this benefits the
manga authors.

However, there are various officially licensed distributors for English
translated manga. Here are a couple of the more well-known ones:

  * <http://shonenjump.viz.com/wsja>
  * <https://www.mangabox.me/reader/en/>
  * <http://www.crunchyroll.com/comics/manga>
  * <http://en-renta.papy.co.jp/>
  * <https://www.emanga.com/>
  * <http://en.mangareborn.jp/>

However while this might not directly influence revenue to the manga author.
Making the manga more widely accessible to the public _can_ help give some
notoriety to a particular series. Hype and notoriety about a particular series
can indirectly boost sales of the series. However it comes down to the efforts
of scanlators and fans to help boost revenue to a manga author.

For an example, the users of 4chan helped boost the sales of
_[WataMote](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WataMote)_ and save it from the
possibility of being canceled. The author [personally
thanked](https://twitter.com/harimoguni/status/337483945061003264) 4chan on
Twitter for their efforts [and those of the scanlators](http://www.world-
three.org/2012/01/21/thats-pretty-cool/).

Even if you read manga from these online aggregates, you can still support the
authors by purchasing their manga when they are collected in volume form, from
such sites such as [Amazon Japan](http://www.amazon.co.jp/In-
English/b?ie=UTF8&node=1094656) or [Honto.jp](http://honto.jp/).


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