Update 2 (July 15, 2014): New, more accurate data is here.

Update (Jul 1, 2014): This post doesn’t measure releases in 2-week totals, which turns out to be a huge deal in many, many cases. I’m currently working on an updated version of both this and the other 2011-2012 manga boost posts. Just be aware of that before citing the data from here regarding any one show.

Some time ago, I published an article looking at how anime adaptations produced in early 2012 affected the sales of their source manga. It was interesting data to take a look at, and it was interesting to see which anime really boosted the manga sales. Long story short, there are cases where a manga really jumps from mid-tier to franchise level (Space Brothers, Kuroko’s Basketball, Inu x Boku SS) soon after the anime airs, and cases where the anime doesn’t have much visible effect.

It was very intriguing to look at, but it wasn’t a sample large enough to draw real definitive conclusions from. So I’ve recently been pulling sales records for manga that had an anime adaptation air in 2011, to get a better idea of how the two media are interrelated. This post contains the first half of that data, specifically the data for which I have specific totals from both before and after the anime first aired, and some observations on that data.

Below are graphs showing the progression of manga sales over time. All graphs are based on the numbers collected on this doc, taken from 2009-2013 Oricon Rankings.

Bakuman

Beelzebub

Blue Exorcist

Chihayafuru

Deadman Wonderland

Hyouge Mono

Kimi ni Todoke

Kimi to Boku

Maken-ki

Mitsudomoe

Nurarihyon no Mago

Sekai-ichi Hatsukoi

Sket Dance

The World God Only Knows

Toriko

Usagi Drop

Working

Some quick observations:

-In terms of sheer upside, the potential for gain for manga publishers investing in an anime is huge. Blue Exorcist was a franchise-making anime, pushing the manga from Double Arts numbers to Bleach numbers in a 6-month span. Kimi to Boku and Deadman Wonderland also show more moderate gains.

-A-1 Pictures is not a sure thing. Their presence is impressive, they’re behind both Space Brothers and Blue Exorcist. But it’s notable that Working, despite being an anime that averaged over 10,000 in per volume unit sales, produced virtually no increase in manga sales.

-The majority of anime adapted for bigger manga titles do not produce dramatic increases in sales to the extenet seen with Blue Exorcist’s explosive rise, though the argument could be made that they cause enough of an increase to be worth some investment. That’s a topic worth more discussion, but here’s one set of calculations. Assuming that Chihayafuru’s anime was responsible for the additional 40000 or so sales per volume we see after season 1, at its price of 450 yen, that’s about 18 million yen in extra sales per volume. Over the 5 volumes that came out between seasons 1 and 2, that produces a total of 90 million yen gross. The budget for a 25-episode anime could range from 250 million to 750 million yen. That’s a sizable chunk of budget the manga can account for.

This part of the sample necessarily selects higher-selling manga as a rule, so it’s dangerous to make more general conclusions from it. Expect to see more in the next two weeks, as there are about 13 more series in a lower tier of sales that I’m working on estimates for. Those should give a better overall picture of the playing field by showing what happens to those series that emerge from the anime with a place on the Oricon charts.