Category Archives: Fun With Numbers

Fun With Numbers: The Decline of US Print Manga Sales and Who Might be Buying into the Digital Manga Boom

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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).

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Fun With Numbers: Do Elements of Ecchi Content/Fanservice Provide a Boost for Blockbuster Shows?

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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.

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Fun With Numbers: Expect to See Sequels Fall Off in Sales

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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.

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A Note on Usable versus Unusable Crowdsourced Tags

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I’m going to be posting anywhere from 1 to 3 articles using animenewsnetwork’s tag system over the next week or two, so I think now would be as good a point as any to make an important point about when it is and isn’t ok to use.

There’s lots of interesting work to be done on the performance of anime and manga of different genres. Classifying the genre of a work of entertainment is tough. Especially when the definition is as amorphous as it is for something like moe. However, in practice, it actually isn’t a huge deal if a site is consistently applying the same incorrect definition; even blatantly incorrect definitions (I’m looking at you, shonen=the genre containing battle action) can yield meaningful results about the type of series fitting the definition being used if they’re consistent. Dealing with them just requires a willingness to dive in and determine exactly what your numbers say.

A much more common and hazardous pitfall tags slip into is one I call selective incompleteness. Quite often, via either lack of attention to the tag or too much attention paid to too few cases, whether or not a series falls under it will depend on whether it’s popular or not. This is a problem for lots of reasons when trying to break down the sales of a genre; every Genre A series that aired over a 10-year period might come up with worse average sales than the two most popular Genre B series of that period, even if the Genre A was generally much more profitable.*

The above is an extreme example, but I hope you see my point. If we’re going to talk about the average performance of a genre, we want their averages (or totals), not just a selection of more-popular-than-average shows that happen to be from those genres. Since popularity can correlate with sales, the risk of higher-selling shows getting selectively tagged is real, and worse so the smaller the tag is.**

ANN’s moe tag, while not quite that extreme a case, is a victim of selective incompleteness to a dangerous degree. One of the easiest ways to test the veracity of a tag is to check whether or not it’s applied consistently in-between seasons of a show. If a series gets a second season largely in line with the first, they should be tagged equivalently. If there is selective tagging going on, then sequels are probably not the only victims, but they are the most visible and arguably objective sign that it’s happening. But, Hidamari Sketch and Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu both fall victim to selective tagging under this tag. Specifically, only the first season of Hidamari Sketch is classified as moe, while only the second season of Nogizaka Haruka is. Neither of these series had sequels that radically changed gears.

I could point out other things that are suspect about the tag (like how Kyoto Animation produced something like 30% of all moe between 2005-2008), but the sequel thing is a red flag. In general, I’ll give tags some leeway, given the fact that some classifications are difficult to make. But any label that splits the difference between seasons of the same show (excluding reboots like Im@s or spinoffs like The Unlimited) is obviously too inconsistent to use. As a rule of thumb, any tag which I can point to as containing several cases of franchises being tagged inconsistently is one that I will not be using for any meaningful analysis.

*Since the profits of the anime hinge on the top 10% of series, the precise designation of a blockbuster like Bakemonogatari do have a lot of analysis-swinging potential. You can’t just ignore the exceptional cases (producing those franchise-series outliers is the business of most publishing industries), but their swing potential is the biggest reason why accurate classification is important. The fact that some of these series have disputed status that varies between databases is the lynchpin of an upcoming addendum to one of my older pieces of work.

**”Smaller” tags also carry a secondary issue, the potential of carrying a definition so specific that it’s hard to draw general conclusions due to small sample sizes. Any list less than 20 shows in length is tough to be general about.

Fun With Numbers: One Season Without a 20k (or even 10k) Hit Isn’t Particularly Meaningful

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Making a smash hit anime involves a number of steps. Typically you have to have to get solid source material, assemble the right staff, and do well on the PR front. But most importantly of all, you have to, to some extent, simply get lucky in getting engaged with your target demographic. This is at the heart of the discussion regarding the recent dearth of hit anime this past Fall and current Winter being the first shows in a while to potentially have no series averaging above 20k and 10k in disk sales, respectively. But how unexpected is that outcome really?

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A Note on Classifying the Non-Manga/LN Sources of 2011/2012’s Anime

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After finishing up an individual analysis of manga and light novel adaptation markets, I had originally planned to toss the remainder of shows not covered in those analyses in one bin and call them “other”. It took about 5 minutes into assembling that sample to realize how incomplete that analysis would have been. There are at least 3 additional distinct categories that anime adaptations fall into: Game Adaptations, Spinoff/Franchise/Merchandise Series based around a larger product line, and True Originals.

Why games should be treated beyond simple disk sales is pretty obvious, but here’s one example. Persona 4: The Golden, released several months after the end of the anime and before the true final episode, sold a reported 248,242 copies in 2012 at an MSRP of over 7000 yen. If its anime was spending 10,000,000 yen per episode, on the low end of what’s been reported to be typical, then the total anime budget was on the order of (10000000*26)/(248242*7000)=.15, or fifteen percent of gross profits from those sales.* So Persona 4 only really needed to bump the game’s sales total up by about 10-20 percent to be worth it before even counting the 30k+ average it posted. Now, the Persona 4 anime hardly needed that money, but this does underscore that for anime series like, say, Starry Sky or Mashiroiro Symphony, being coupled to a PSP re-release of their source title is a pretty potentially big deal. I’ll be using vgchartz or something over the next several weeks to determine just how much, but it’s definitely something that needs to be looked at along with disk sales in determining how successful titles at all tiers of sales were.

The reason why spinoffs and original anime are not lumped together is a bit more nuanced. Though the distinction between the two is a tad fuzzy, the notion that truly original anime have stronger marketing pushes behind them that may prompt better disk sales is worth strong consideration. Not to mention that there’s at least some element of merchandise (however unquantifiable) being marketed beyond the disks. All of the 10k+ series in the non-Game/Manga/LN heap are true originals, so there may be more to that idea than a pipe dream. I can tell you right now that the list of originals makes for a fairly stacked chart; including things whose main goals were TV ratings (noitaminA, Phi Brain) and excluding Madoka Magica, the average original TV anime in this period sold over 8000 disks per volume.

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Fun With Numbers: The (Relatively) Predictable Light Novel Adaptation Market

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In the past several weeks, Ohayocon-induced hiatus aside,* I’ve been compiling the sales data of light novels that became anime in 2011 and 2012. Put bluntly, the ecosystem of initial print sales->anime sales->additional print sales is very, very different from manga. With manga, it was very often the case that a comparatively unpopular manga like Blue Exorcist could produce the anime sales of a superhit while a way more popular manga like Sukitte Ii Nayo could produce anime sales all too close to nonexistent. Additionally, poor-selling anime like Kamisama Dolls and Zetsuen no Tempest often led to big surges in manga sales while popular anime like Yuruyuri produced negligible manga gains.

With light novels, that sort of thing can still happen, but it’s far rarer. In general, there are two dominant trends in the light novel market. One, better-selling light novels produce better-selling anime. Two, better-selling anime produce bigger increases in light novel sales. Though it should be noted, as always, that the extent to which this effect carries does vary somewhat.

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Fun With Numbers: Comparing US Print and US Digital Manga Markets

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The argument that diversity in a medium benefits fans is a pretty simple one, which can be made several ways. From one angle, it’s good to have a lot of series selling well because then the medium is safe financially if one superhit series ends. From another angle, it’s good to have a lot of series selling well because that means the industry can experiment more, finding the sweet spots of niches that might fall through the cracks if the industry was mostly dependent on 10 or so series earning 80 percent of the total income. I mean, it’s good to have those sort of “carry the team” hits, but an industry solely dependent on established blockbusters is going to be in trouble when the big guy’s fuel tank runs dry if they don’t have some sort of farm system in place to generate another crop of them.

When a market has strong diversity, one of the ways it manifests is in a rapid turnover rate in bestseller lists from week to week; series in the top 10 one week will be quickly pushed aside by new releases. Particularly in front-loaded markets (i.e. ones where the majority of sales take place over the first 2-3 weeks of release), it’s a very discouraging sign when a given week’s slate can’t even beat the runoff from last week’s. Since manga is a market where the thresholds for charting are ridiculously high and hard numbers are almost totally unavailable outside of Japan, this turnover rate is one of the few ways we can start to compare the two markets.

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Fun With Numbers: Anime as Light Novel Advertisments in 2012

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Compared to 2011, 2012 represents an upswing year for the industry; more overall TV anime was being made. In addition to simply seeing more light novel adaptations, we saw several adaptations of finished series (Kotenbu/Hyouka and Chuu2koi) and single novels (Another, Shinsekai Yori). Those four are notable, but not within the LN data I’ve been using for my sample.* Perhaps because of the minor resurgence in the industry, we do see a bit of an increase in the number of series that performed in unexpected ways. The performance of light novels which were adapted in 2012 in relation to the time frame their adaptation aired is charted below. The raw data is on this doc, and can be compared with the 2012 sample for manga.

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Fun With Numbers: Anime as Light Novel Advertisments in 2011

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Despite the fact that both get released in compiled volumes costing somewhere between 400 and 1000 yen a few times a year, the market for manga differs in many ways from the market for light novels. For one thing, it’s a much smaller scale market; the most popular light novels sell hundreds of thousands of copies immediately after their release, rather the millions that One Piece/Fairy Tail/Attack on Titan bring in. Too, light novel adaptations tend to succeed much more as a function of their initial popularity than manga does. To get an in-depth look at how anime adaptations of light novels have impacted the source material, I’ve plotted the sales for their first two weeks of solicitation over time, with the airdate of the anime superimposed. See this doc for the raw data, and compare the 2011 data for manga adaptations.

Note: I plot the two-week totals, rather than the one-week total, because even the average the first week total is vulnerable to a series that comes out on the last of the Oricon tracking period and having its sales numbers hamstrung. Kore wa Zombie Desu Ka had 4 volumes in a row come out on the last day of the week, obscuring a very real anime-fueled boost in sales.

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