I was having an argument on another site about fansubs, and to what extent they harm or help the industry. The context was myanimelist has removed the fansubs field from each show, since they're now owned by a Japanese company and have streaming deals with major sites, so it felt inappropriate for them to be promoting pirate sites.
People complained that the industry "owes" fansubbers for making anime popular. However, most scholars agree that the critical period in which fansubs grew anime exposure in the west was from around 1980-1995.
What happened after that was in fact that DVDs started coming out, and it cost them very little to include the Japanese audio plus a subtitle track as an added bonus, making it vastly easier for fansubbers to come along and repackage the material. Plus mass exposure from 1996+ had far more to do with TV adaptations of Sailor Moon, Pokemon, Dragonball in the first wave, and Toonami / Adult Swim in the second wave than it owes to fansubbers. Sure, fansubbers now increase exposure of some obscure titles that were never release, but how much of that activity actually leads to increased sales? The only people who really care are obsessives who want to see all these obscure things.
So what does the industry now owe to some young kid who subs shows from DVDs and/or by adapting the Crunchyroll subs, and puts them on a torrent site?