Note: The original version of this article incorrectly stated that there were 39 shows in the Autumn list, not 38. This has been corrected.

This is the first proper article in what will hopefully be a few individual examinations of the power of various indicators to predict disk sales in a rough manner. This segment deals with Torne rankings, a list ranking shows based on how often they were recorded on PS3 DVR. The original data can be found here, and is collected on this doc. I’m comparing these ranks with the rank of v1 disk sales to see how predictive the former were of the latter, based on an over/under 4000 accuracy model.

See this post for details, but basically, one can get 66% accuracy just by predicting that every v1 will sell under 4000 disks (25 of 38 shows in the season were under). Hopefully, good models will do better than that. In order to test how well each metric performs, I take the top 5, 10, and 15 seasonal shows from the metric and guess they will be over 4000 while everything else will flop, then see how many of those “guesses” end up being right. Clerical note: I’m excluding shows from different seasons (eg Monogatari, HxH) that end up in the Torne rankings, and my top 15 shows are the top 15 to rank from Fall 2013 only.

Since Torne rankings are available monthly, I also compared the accuracy of different months; one might expect later months to be closer to the final sales total, as people have had more time and information (read: episodes of the show) with which to make an informed decision. Assuming the metrics are indicative at all, of course.

Anyway, here’s how accurate the top 5/10/15 guess models were for October/November/December Torne Rankings (numbers outperforming the null hypothesis in green):

The top 15 model doesn’t seem to be particularly precise in general, but accuracy improved each month, and the December rankings were actually notably accurate. We’ll see how these indicators stack up against others (and how well they compare with source boosts) later.