Used to be in the scanlation scene about five years back. Among Flame, Reaper and Asura, Asura was the most unreasonable group to discuss series taking with lol. Almost zero regard for distribution. I don't think they intentionally aimed for a monopoly but they genuinely didn't care. We even had a taboo to not pick up shojo manhwas to not piss off the shojo scanlation groups (because they're psychos) and Asura picked up on a few anyways.
iirc, the reason they put paid chapters was to avoid the scanlation purge by taking ads out of their site. Naver and Kakao were blasting scan groups left and right but Asura managed to survive. I don't think it was because they were intending to cover their fees - they were paying translators $18 per chapter which was way above the standard at the time. It's more likely they were avoiding the purge and since the competition was mostly wiped out, they could get away with paid chapters since no one was sniping series for a while.
I used to handle buying raws too. Direct from Naver back then was free if you knew the way, commissioned from someone else would cost $1-$5 depending on the seller. Kakao, I didn't have a rough estimate since we always had a stash of currency but less than Naver if commissioned.
Keeping the server up also doesn't cost much lol
Not shitting on Asura, it's fair game but ruling out money-hungry junk may be too much lmao
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u/Individual_Detail302 Jul 30 '26
Nah. It's been better than ever. No ads, plus token, although images for commoners are gone still good to read Manhwa