[praxulus]

>A customer actually has no competitor to move to - crunchyroll has a defacto monopoly (barring piracy).

When fansubs were good, Crunchyroll was forced to compete with them on quality. It's hard to convince people to pay when the alternative is both free and much higher quality.

Now that they've driven fansubs groups "out of business", they no longer face the same degree of competitive pressure to deliver a quality product.

[jcranmer]

My recollection is that, by the early days of Crunchyroll, fansubs weren't really competing on quality so much as speed. And with the legitimate licensors having access to the scripts slightly in advance of the Japanese release, the fansubs could never catch up to them in release speed.

[extraduder_ire]

In the very early days they were a piracy site that hosted fansubs.