American anime industry

The chair of AX says the attendees of Anime Expo is averaging about 20 percent annual growth,
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2005/07/07/apop.DTL

but Ask John mentioned "The contemporary American anime industry is in dire straights. Evidence suggests that many of America's anime distributors are struggling financially."
http://www.animenation.net/news/askjohn.php?id=1123

What's this all about?

You will lose something in the translation, and you will lose something due to differences in the American target market. This is almost inevitable. If the company who licenses a property for the Western market really cares about their viewers and the series more than they do money, they'll put effort into it and do a good job of it.

Too often though you'll find that edits happen between the Japanese manga and the Japanese anime, and then more edits will happen between the Japanese anime and the English language dub of the anime. You end up going from "Targetted at 11-15 year olds but appreciated by a wider audience, voiced by professionals who went to voice acting college, being cool and interesting to Western viewers BECAUSE it's Japanese rather than in spite of it" to "Targetted at 6-11 year olds because ONLY KIDS WATCH CARTOONS HURR, dubbed to shove it out onto TV as quickly and cheaply as possible, stripped of a lot of the things that make it cool and different, and heavily censored besides."