Since February, I’ve made it a habit to track R1 anime releases on US Amazon, hoping to get an idea of how sales figures look for specific US series. I recently finished up taking data for the month of June (available here).

Recently, that study seems to have begun bearing fruit. Combined with assumptions about the positions of their blu-ray top 20 versus the overall top 20, I was able to come up with a power law approximating how much a day ranking on US Amazon was worth in terms of disks sold per day (#=300,000/rank). Recently, I got my first substantial bit of proof that this prediction method was at least somewhat viable (to within +/-20%), and I’m at the point where I’m ready to put out very basic estimates of what first-week sales figures for various releases should look like for those series released in June.

Note: Since first week sales include preorders, I approximate those by taking the value of the daily sales for the first day of the week and multiplying that by 7. I don’t have 3 weeks of preorder data for all series, but that seems to produce similar numbers to just converting all the preorder rankings into sales, and is easier to standardize (obviously, I reserve the right to revise this as necessary).

While these ARE STILL ROUGH GUESSES AND SHOULD BE TREATED AS SUCH at the very least until Attack on Titan’s part 1 release provides a second test when the numbers come out in about a month, I’m confident enough to at least post them as speculation fodder. Also note that these estimates are only for the first week of a release, not the overall lifetime sales (I have no idea what those look like at this point). That said, here they are:

*-denotes release that was half-off or more on amazon for at least part of the tracking period.