Crunchyroll has something like 70,000 subscribers, and probably over ten times as many people clicking on their free streams. That's the kind of numbers that can let you go to advertisers and say, "Look, we've got a demographic here. Want to stick some unskippable ads in the videostreams?"
Does Anime on Demand have the same clout to enable them to do the same thing? Remember the comparative sizes of the UK and US fandoms, coupled with CR being a company with actual global reach, not just US.
Actually a better indicator might be Funimation's Youtube streams, which do us the favour of counting the views. Check the page for the
Fairy Tale streams. Again, these are streaming to the (much of the) world, not just the US, or the UK. They've been putting up two episodes a week every week. The most recent episodes have been up for three weeks, and they've only had around 12.000 and 14.000 views respectively. Worse, the episodes reach a plateau point after some time, and the majority of the earlier episodes peak at around 30,000 views.
To make content free, they have to sell advertising on the strength of those numbers, thousands where companies would much rather reach millions. And Anime on Demand is a fraction of that.
It's why I feel that the anime industry as a whole, from all the way back at the start point, should be subsidising free streaming as a loss leader for eventual home media sales.
