In late 2021, Vietnamese authorities, acting on complaints from the Vietnam Publishing Association, seized the original nettruyen.com domain. The reason: hosting copyrighted content without permission.
For a week, readers panicked. Then, like a phoenix, Nettruyen reappeared at nettruyenco.com, nettruyenfan.com, and half a dozen mirrors. nettruyen
Of course, this success came at a cost. Manga publishers—Japanese kadokawa, Korean Kakao, and Vietnamese licensors like Kim Đồng Publishing House—saw Nettruyen as a massive drain on potential revenue. In late 2021, Vietnamese authorities, acting on complaints
Let’s be honest with ourselves.
The argument against Nettruyen:
It’s piracy. Scanlators spend hours translating, typesetting, and cleaning manga for free, and aggregators like Nettruyen profit from ad revenue without paying creators. A single lost sale of a One Piece volume in Vietnam might not matter, but multiply that by millions—and it hurts the industry’s ability to license more titles legally. Then, like a phoenix, Nettruyen reappeared at nettruyenco
The argument for Nettruyen:
Before Nettruyen, Vietnamese manga readers had almost zero legal options. Today, apps like K Manga (official) and Bilibili Comics exist, but they are clunky, region-restricted, or require microtransactions. Nettruyen democratized access. Many fans say they later bought physical copies because they discovered a series on Nettruyen first.
There is no clean answer. What’s undeniable is that Nettruyen exposed a market gap that official distributors have been too slow to fill.