Got two weeks’ worth of amazon/sales correlations in this post, and they’ve got a couple little weird data nuggets buried inside ’em. Get ready for a quick data-dump followed by some wild child speculation. Same as usual, really.
The most recent week of reported US sales data (10/26-11/01, 2015) was a big one for some notable deviations from the norm, some bigger than others. A bunch of Funimation titles outperformed both their rankings and their typical weekly performances, which I might be able to explain. The Wind Rises, on the other hand, dropped over 17,000 copies from its BD total, which is a little bit of a head-scratcher. I have some thoughts on each case.
The most recent 3 weeks of sales data were tumultuous, seeing 6 new releases of 3 different movies and some serious chart variance. I’m dumping the data and running through the highlights – there are interesting hints that might help the predictive formula, but all are more suggestive than definite.
Starting December tracking pretty early into November not for any special reason, but rather because the first release day of December is the first day of the month, so I kind of have to for consistency. Calendars, amirite?
Three notes about tracking this month:
1 – Viz will be reissuing Sailor Moon R part 2 sets courtesy of an audio syncing error on one episode. I’ll be tracking both the old and the new sets as this reissue happens.
2 – Library War and Saint Seiya: The Lost Canvas got pushed back a few weeks and are now December releases.
3 – I added some last-minute November releases to the tracking pool. Won’t promise, but will try to add such things when I notice they’ve been added.
Oh, and since it’s a movie, maybe Nash will count Aura and we’ll get to see it sell a little?
Since the most recently available week of Nash Info Services data allowed me to really fine-tune my prediction formula, I figured I was about ready to put it to the test on amazon data and actually predict some US anime sales. So I set out to do so on 3 months’ worth of year-old releases, picking months with releases I have concrete year-one data for. Seemed pretty straightforward at the time.
…Turns out it’s never that simple. There were a couple of factors I had to consider when trying to make truly complete estimates. But with some fast and loose statistical gamesmanship, I was able to get some estimates. This time around, I have substantive reason to suspect they’re pretty good.
On account of a Thanksgiving week where no anime is coming out, Novermber will end up being a pretty lean month, one currently set to have only 21 releases. I added two more to this dataset for the end of October; a pair of Lupin/Conan movies that got added to the end-of-October slate last minute. So I’ll be tracking 23 releases total this month in total. I’ll also be adding the DBZ/Marnie/Naruto movies to the special tracking list in a week when the October collection finishes up.
Due to circumstances largely beyond my control I’ve had little time to work on the analysis of the amazon tracking data. The tracking is ongoing and easy but the writeups are decidedly not, and before I realized it I had 3 full weeks worth of data to expound on.
It’s not all bad – I had some time to do some stuff with the overall US charts and got a significantly better understanding of where the project as a whole stands.
So this week’s Vampire Hunter D data is… different. DVD data didn’t update when the rest of the DVD data did. BD figures *did* update, but dropped off about 60 freaking percent. Last week saw the BD lifetime total at 4404 copies. This week the Nash DB has the same total down all the way to 1768! That’s not some small-time mistake, yo. I um, I saw this a few days ago and I don’t know enough four letter words to describe how this makes me feel. Look at this biz:
It’s a nightmare, really. I’m still flabbergasted. But after seeing these figures a few days ago, I think I have a crack theory about what might be going on.
Vampire Hunter D’s rerelease sold 476 BDs and 60 DVDs in its fourth week on sale (9/14/2015-9/20/2015), for a total of 536 copies sold. That’s down 31% from last week. This brings the 4-week total to 4651 copies sold.
A source pic is included after the jump.
Part 3 of an ongoing project to investigate what correlation, if any, exists between the amazon rank for US anime releases and their actual sales.
When I first conceived of this little amazon tracking expedition, I envisioned it as a 3-4 week excursion at most. At the time I was pulling up numbers individually and inputting them into spreadsheets, and it seemed like it would be a stretch to do so for a prolonged period of time. All the more so because this would be happening in September of 2015, one of the largest months I’ve ever tracked containing a massive total of 44 releases. Add in the 22 releases on the special list, and that’s a few minutes a day more than I was used to spending on this little sub-hobby.
To make the task significantly less obtrusive, I wrote a script that does the retrievals for me at a leisurely pace of one page rank per second (so as not to appear as an attack on amazon’s servers). This has since paid exponential dividends, saving me hours over the course of a month and making it possible to continue long-term tracking in perpetuity. And as this week’s worth of data (from 9/7-9/13) shows, it will be very helpful to have those extra datapoints.
Animetics 