Two separate bits of info that come in small blurbs – one gives the sales total for the first issue of US Shonen Jump as about 250,000 copies (a factor of 10 less than its Japanese parent), and the other gives the contemporary box office records of the best-performing anime movies released in the US.
Animetics 
A little saddening how little that list has changed in a decade:
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/genres/chart/?id=anime.htm
Also, the 2003 estimation ‘value’ of Akira’s performance is waaaaay off (or just adjusted for inflation, not sure).
Akira seems to had a persistent disinformation campaign for years, probably by a few dedicated fanboys, to make it a bigger financial success than it really was. Watch out for any sales numbers about it on the web, if they don’t have a trustworthy citation.
It took me six months and only recently did I finally tracked down the movie’s box office in Japan with a proper source – 750 million yen – on a 1989 Japanese trade magazine (Kinenote Issue 1000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Akira_(film)#Box_office_.22success.22 ). Which is a far cry from the ridiculus 6 billionish figure that you find floating bandied everywhere on English web.
Nasty business, that. Whether it’s a deliberate disinformation campaign or just Goji berry crap that went viral before facts could be checked, that’s definitely a cautionary tale. Method is the most important part of gathering information, and enough people care more about winning an argument than being factually correct. I remember there was a thing in the Macross community a while back where a reputed member claimed a bunch of later discredited stuff via a close connection with Kawamori: http://forums.animesuki.com/showthread.php?p=2585414#post2585414
My policy on less certain stuff is to slap clear qualifying statements on it, like I’ve been doing with the US amazon stuff. It’s also why I’m doing article scans – primary sources are a pain to parse, but incredibly valuable.
It’s also frustrating, because I get ideas from them that I want to research further (like the weekly/monthly authors’ involvement in anime adaptations of their work), but I’ve got like my next 6 FWN pieces planned out; commentary on the multiple 10k+ directors list, add 2010 print (manga and LN) adaptation data, use that data to compare sequel probabilities between series with/without print bumps, revisit the effects of licenses accounting for split cour series and different definitions of borderline sales numbers, and then fold all that new data plus the newly made sequels for some shows into a revised sequel probability equation. And it’ll be a miracle if those come out at a rate of 1 per week.
Your site might very well be the last refuge left for these type of primary source, I only lucked out on the Akira number because Google Books happened to scanned a copy. Otherwise the citogenesis process would probably have perpertuated indefinitely. These scans are valuable work and I’m glad you’re putting them out there.