Weekly Oricon Rankings for manga, continued from the 2012 post.
Weekly Manga Sales Charts for 2013
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Author Archives: torisunanohokori
Weekly Manga Sales Charts for 2012
Weekly Oricon Rankings for manga, continued from the 2011 post.
Weekly Manga Sales Charts for 2011
Weekly Oricon Rankings for manga, continued from the 2010 post.
Weekly Manga Sales Charts for 2010
Weekly Oricon Rankings for manga, continued from the 2009 post. Continue reading
Weekly Manga Sales Charts for 2009
Weekly Oricon Rankings for manga, continued from the 2008 post.
Weekly Manga Sales Charts For 2008 (September-December)
Unlike Light Novels, where doing any kind of research pretty much required making an easy-access database, research on manga sales was doable with existing web databases. When looking into it 6 months ago, I used animenewsnetwork’s related news stories for various manga to access sales charts where given series appeared. Unfortunately, those link libraries were often incomplete, and I had to employ a ramshackle method where I used One Piece’s constant presence in the Oricon ranks to get to the release week for a given series and determine whether it charted or not and what the threshold was. It was boring, menial work, but it was never boring or menial enough that I got turned off of my end goal.
That said, I can see the effort involved in that method being prohibitive for a lot of future research. And, if possible, I want to be talking a bit more about manga (both as an industry and as a creative process) in the near future. So I collected the myanimelist weekly sales charts for manga in a similar fashion to how I did for Light Novels, deciding to post them here again to make it easier for other people who want to take a quick, easy lookback at how different manga evolved over time.
Once again, this is not my data. It was originally collected by Snowical, dtshyk, and symbv of the myanimelist news team, who have done excellent work.
Fun With Numbers: The Decline of US Print Manga Sales and Who Might be Buying into the Digital Manga Boom
I’ve been over this before, but it bears repeating – print manga in the US is a lot more like anime in Japan than it is manga in Japan; it’s expensive, with a relatively small customer base. Manga in Japan only costs anywhere from 400-900yen, small enough that marketing to elementary school kids with their weekly allowances is a plausible strategy. In the US, the cheapest print manga start from $9, and can cost quite a bit more. This makes manga in the US a smaller, more exclusive market. At that price point, the proposition of just buying a $60 anime box set (there’s a pretty understandable overlap between the fanbases) starts to look a lot more appealing.
In more practical terms, manga was perpetually being walloped by anime in the US market. While the total gross of all manga tracked through bookscan in 2007 was just a hair under $109 million (all gross totals from that article unless otherwise linked), the total gross of anime DVDs in the US in that same year was over $300 million, a number surpassing not just the manga total, but the $183 million gross of the entire US comics market that same year. While more recent statistics regarding anime are hard to come by, that still speaks to a huge contrast in US sales potency for an industry where the 2013 annual gross of One Piece by itself (18,151,599*500~9 billion yen) tops the total of the top two averagers of the post-Evangelion era (Bakemonogatari and Madoka sold about 6.5 billion yen worth of disks between them).
Midseason Update: This Winter in s-CRY-ed Quotes
Back in the day, before I had the money to import anime, or eve to buy them at a discount, I had access to a VCR and a stack of 5 VHS tapes. I learned to program that VCR for the express purpose of recording Toonami, Adult Swim Anime, and the like on days when I couldn’t make it home. And if there was one show that was my number 1 at the time, it was battle/rivalry series s-CRY-ed.
Fueled almost entirely by banter between the leading duo. Kazuma and Ryuho were as memorable a pair of rivals as I can recall having watched to this day, and the script that was field-raised ham on a whole-wheat drama bun produced a memorable, unique-tasting fight series. And plenty of potable quotes, which is why I’m dedicating this entry to cemented legacy club member director Taniguchi Goro.
And to punching things while yelling loudly
Oh, and incoming spoilers for a 12 year-old show, if you’re averse to that kind of thing.
Fun With Numbers: Do Elements of Ecchi Content/Fanservice Provide a Boost for Blockbuster Shows?
One of the things I love about giving panels/talks at cons is the Q&A component. Sure, every time there’s at least one guy whose question that’s a recitation essay, but you also get a lot of stimulation; observations beyond your field of view from people outside your normal circles of interaction. One of the best questions I got during Ohayocon came after the Myth of Fanservice panel talking about the results of this article. I don’t remember the exact wording, but it was to the effect of “I get from this presentation that shallow fanservice doesn’t sell, but fanservice that’s a component of an otherwise good show actually annoys me more, because it makes it harder to recommend shows. What about fanservice as a minor component of a show, rather than the central one?” At the time, I replied that it was an interesting question, but that I hadn’t tested it and couldn’t come up with a way off the top of my head.
After I thought about it for a while, I realized there’s actually a fairly intuitive way of getting at this question. Since exactly how fanservice/ecchi elements a show has to include before being a fanservice/ecchi show varies from person to person, it was very possible that one could get a snapshot of that spectrum by looking at how two separate databases with varying standards classified a show. As fate would have it, myanimelist (ecchi genretag) and animenewsnetwork (ecchi+fanservice themetags)* classify shows as ecchi in ways that are different enough that one can split shows from my original black/white sample into 3 meaningful categories.**
1. No/Minimal Ecchi (Not tagged under either system)
2. Ambiguously Ecchi (Tagged under one system, but not the other)
3. Unambiguously Ecchi (Tagged under both systems)
Theoretically, if a show is really heavy on the fanservice, it’ll end up being in category 3, and if it’s got naked men wrestling behind one-way glass, it’ll end up being in category 1. If there’s room to dispute how much fanservice a show has and/or how central it is, it’ll more likely end up in category 2. And by comparing those 3 categories, we should be able to get some idea of how much fanservice as a component does for shows with other notable selling points. The breakdowns for the categories can be found on this doc, and analysis can be found after the break.
Fun With Numbers: Expect to See Sequels Fall Off in Sales
With the rare Shonen Junai Gumi/GTO-tier exception, the viewership of sequels follows a very solid rule of thumb; fewer people tend to watch the second season, and the ones who do tend to be ones who are generally in love with the franchise. But not everyone who loved season 1 of a given show will end up watching season 2. In real life, stuff like time constraints, stress, and other shows all serve as potential distractions from continuing to support a franchise. Though people who buy hard copies of a show are generally in that group of hardcore fans, they’re still human, and any number of factors could cause them to keep their cash in their wallets. If myanimelist rankings tend to overestimate the quality of a sequel, then sales might tend to underestimate its appeal.
So it’s worth asking the question; what percent of its sales does a typical show “lose” when it moves on to season 2? Since I already had a list of series that got sequels from 2005-2012 laying around from my work on the sequel probability equation, and most of those sequels have been at least partially made by now, it’s a fairly simple question (barring one wrinkle) to address.
Animetics 