What Crunchyroll's Own Channels Give Away Free, Counted

Anime Corner reports that Crunchyroll is recruiting a lead to head its work against anime copyright infringement worldwide. The other half of that picture is what the company already gives away free on YouTube. This is a record of what our index found, not a mirror of those channels.

We record 154 anime entries with at least one free, playable YouTube episode row from a channel Crunchyroll operates. The channels our index names are Crunchyroll, Crunchyroll Dubs, Crunchyroll Brasil, Crunchyroll Deutschland, Crunchyroll Italia, and Crunchyroll en Español. All 154 pages were fetched from animesphere.app twice today. Every one returned HTTP 200 both times, and none changed its count or note between passes. One caveat on reading those numbers: the count on an AnimeSphere page is a whole-title figure covering every official free source we hold, not a tally of Crunchyroll uploads.

A sampler, mostly one episode deep

Of the 154, 140 state a free episode count, and those 140 come to 220 episodes between them. The distribution is lopsided. 111 of the 140 state exactly one episode. 25 state three. The rest are one each at two, five, twelve and fifteen. Exactly one of the 140 reaches its own recorded series total. The other 14 entries state no free count at all.

Counted a second way, by what those channels themselves supply in our index: 123 titles supply one episode, 27 supply three, two supply two, one supplies five, and one supplies seventeen.

The duplication is worth naming. My Dress-Up Darling carries 21 free rows with us. They are three episodes, each uploaded seven separate times by a different Crunchyroll channel. Its page states 3, because it counts episodes and not uploads.

Two that play from the United States

My Dress-Up Darling states 3 free episodes against a recorded series total of 12, so the free run stops after episode 3. The three English uploads sit on the Crunchyroll channel, which carries a YouTube verified badge, and their titles number them 1 through 3 as we store them. Each reports an authored English subtitle track alongside an automatic Japanese caption track, so this is Japanese audio with real English subtitles rather than a dub. Each runs 1,430 seconds against a recorded episode length of 24 minutes. All three played from a United States request today.

RILAKKUMA states 15, and those are episodes 9 through 23. Episodes 1 to 8 are not free here. The recorded episode length is 1 minute and the uploads run 90 seconds, so these are whole episodes. We hold two uploads per episode, one marked SUB and one marked DUB. The SUB uploads carry a country list that excludes the United States, and episodes 9, 16 and 23 in that version did not play from a United States request today. The DUB uploads carry a country list that includes the United States, and those same three episodes did play. Those DUB uploads report an automatic English caption track, meaning English audio.

Six of the 14 that state nothing are Assassination Classroom, KONOSUBA, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable, Junji Ito Collection, The Quintessential Quintuplets, and The God of High School. Our index does hold Crunchyroll-channel rows for each. A page counts only rows we record as English or Japanese, or with no language recorded.