Vampire Hunter D’s rerelease sold 743 BDs and 34 DVDs in its third week on sale (9/7/2015-9/13/2015), for a total of 777 copies sold. That’s down about 35% from last week, but still a fair amount of copies added. This brings the 3-week total to 4115 copies sold.
I’ll be formally reporting on this release for another 2 weeks, after which I’ll fold it into my special amazon tracking posts.
A source pic is included after the jump.
Part 2 of an ongoing project to investigate what correlation, if any, exists between the amazon rank for US anime releases and their actual sales.
In the previous week’s data, I discovered a general pattern for how series ranking in the #1k-#40k range on amazon were selling, as well as indications that amazon tends to undersell how well DVDs are performing.
In looking at the second week of data, I’m interested in answering two questions related to the strength of that finding.
1) Does the general correlation between ranks and sales found last week still remain in this week’s data?
2) Do changes in the rank of a specific release correlate with an increase/decrease of actual sales, as we would expect they might?
One my long-term goals with this site is to gain as much insight into the current state of home video sales in the US anime industry as I can. To that end, I’ve been tracking monthly releases and how they rank on amazon, as well as the sales totals for those that make the Nash Information Services charts. Recently, I’ve stepped up my efforts with a script that makes it efficient to track large numbers of releases and access to the full Nash DB via OpusData. In particular, I’ve had my eye on a bunch of releases in the database which are still moving copies on amazon, and thus offer an opportunity to check the correlation between amazon ranks and sales at various levels of success.
Now that the Nash Information Services database has been updated with data for that week, we can start to take those numbers and try to dissect what they mean. As a happy accident, Vampire Hunter D’s rerelease charted in the same week and we can include that bit of data from late-August tracking as well.
Before we start on the new data, I’d like to emphasize at the outset that I’ve learned from looking at their full database that Nash Info doesn’t always track releases, even when they nominally fit the qualifications to be tracked, TV or movie or otherwise. This solves a lot of issues (see Steins;Gate box, Space Dandy) which faced previous tracking assumptions.
Vampire Hunter D’s rerelease added quite a few more copies in its second week on sale – 1137 BDs and 54 DVDs. The movie’s 2-week total is now up to 3338 copies.
Average amazon ranks for the two totals are #402 (BD) and #6904 (DVD). This will be the last time for a few weeks I’ll be able to compare amazon rankings to sales for this particular release, due to my own oversight in tracking.
A source pic is included after the jump.
The usual batch of amazon data for US anime releases planned for the month of October. This month is highlighted by a trio of heavyweights; Omoide no Marnie, Fukkatsu no F, and the one Naruto Movie with the deceptive title. Normally it’d just be worth celebrating a chance of seeing one of them chart, but we’ll likely have numbers for all 3 this time around now that I’m using the full Nash Info database.
Two notes – one, Sasami-san’s DVD version actually came out in July of 2014, but I’m tracking it here because I usually like to examine how the companion product does when an alternate version comes out. Second, as of this week I’ve added Vampire Hunter D to the full-time special target tracking list, which I’m likely to maintain in perpetuity.
[The data seen below was taken on September 28th.]
The Nash Information Services database is now current for BD and DVD sales in the week ending in August 30th of this year. Though Vampire Hunter D’s BD rerelase (with a sprinkling of DVDs on top) didn’t make the top 20 that week, it was in the Nash database, and its average ranking of #177 on amazon ended up translating into 2147 total copies sold (2048 BD+99 DVD).
Thanks to my new amazon data retrieval script, it was easy to track it for an extra week in a crowded month, so we’ll be able to compare these numbers with those for its second week when the Nash DB updates again. This is the first time I’ve gotten hard numbers for a Section 23 release, so that’s an interesting side-note.
A source pic is included after the jump.
Over the next 3 weeks, I’ll be tracking a few older, popular anime releases with entries in the OpusData database in an attempt to relate middle and low-tier amazon ranks with smaller increases in sales totals. The database seems to update concurrent with added individual weeks for BD and DVD formats on TheNumbers (which is run by the same company). The hope is that, when the sales figures update for the relevant week, I’ll know exactly when those sales happened and be able to put both an amazon number and a sales number on the same time period. Thus, I should be able to get as good an idea of how amazon ranks relate to total sales as I possibly can. We’ll see, though; this could just as easily result in nothing of value.
For transparency, here’s the list of 12 titles, 22 releases on my list. It’s rough, just the titles and their different editions, ranks on August 24th, and links to the amazon sales pages.
This September is a month with 5 Tuesdays, and it’s a crowded month anyway, so it’s packed to the gills. Noteworthy for the usual “high initial ranks mean it just might make the charts” reasons are Space Dandy part 2, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, and the 3-edition release of Tokyo Ghoul.
Also, there’s some weirdness happening this month:
-Descendants of Darkness isn’t ranking yet, for whatever reason. Hopefully whatever issue is causing that will clear up before its release date is really close.
-There are two Jojo editions, both getting preorders, both DVD-only, same MSRP, identical except for the level of detail on the amazon page and the level of discount offered. For now, I’ll refer to them on the tracking spreadsheet by their amazon url codes (B00X5UIUEU and B00XYHOIIQ).
Recently, via the creation of a second OpusData trial account, I was able to acquire some new data that sheds light on how several newer US anime release performed in the long term. This includes 5 releases (Attack on Titan: Part 2, One Piece Film Z, The Wind Rises, Evangelion: Ha, The Tale of Princess Kaguya) for which we have at least one week of sales data already, plus 4 releases (Momo, Hal, Bayonetta, The Cat Returns) that came out in the 12 months and failed to chart once. Excluding Evangelion: Ha, and The Cat Returns, all of these titles came out between September and November 2014, so they’re roughly comparable in terms of the amount of time since release they’ve had to accrue new sales.
[Note: OpusData and TheNumbers, where I usually get what hard US video sales data I post, are owned and operated by the same company, Nash Info Services.]
The info that can be gleaned from them is interesting, but let me just say right now that I’m really happy about the clerical error that logged Attack on Titan’s second set as a movie, and hence trackable long-term in the Opus database.
Depending on what sort of life you live and whether it’s peak hot summer wherever you are, August might be a long month. Thankfully, at least it’s got a fairly short list of anime releases, which makes it blessedly easy for me to handle.
It’s also nice because 2-3 of the things up for release this month are things I care about and will likely buy, so there’s that.
Animetics 