Category Archives: Articles

Fun With Numbers: Incomplete Collection

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I spent this morning putting together US amazon release data for September. It’s shaping up to be an interesting months in a while – at the least, series that haven’t provided any DVD/BD chart datapoints yet are in the mid-to-low 4 digits, suggesting some of them could possibly chart, yielding more data that would make estimating sales via amazon more feasible. That’s a lot of fun, and I wish I could be more excited about that, but getting together the data reminded me of something I’d much rather forget; Sentai Filmworks’ Gatchaman Crowds release. It’s labeled on amazon as the ‘Complete’ Collection, which is a label it takes tremendous balls to stick with when your release knowingly excludes the actual last episode of the series. The official reason why the Sentai version of Crowds will be excluding the episode is that it is owned by some entity separate from the original licensee, was given in a answer which was (probably intentionally) vague about exactly what happened in regards to the episode. What is not vague at all is the fact that the R1 release of this series will be lacking critical content as the home video equivalent of a 500-page novel with the last 20 pages ripped out.

Personally, I’m perfectly okay with companies that play to win. Anime is a niche market, and people at every level have to make hard choices in dealing with the business side of the industry. I’d rather an industry stay sustainable and churn out products I really like than break the bank over artistic integrity and end up unable to churn out any kind of work in the future. That statement represents a significant oversimplification – entertainment being a business doesn’t force a binary choice between sales and artistic integrity – but my point here is that choices made with finance in mind aren’t necessarily evil ones. There is a wrinkle to this particular story, though, that rubs me the wrong way.

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Fun With Numbers: September 2014 US Amazon Data (Initial Numbers)

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August was a boring month as far as high-powered releases go. September is not, and there are a couple of series (particularly the Steins Gate combo pack hovering around 1500 with 4 weeks to go and the second half of Attack on Titan) which figure to have a pretty decent chance of making the US BD charts and providing really useful data. 4 solid datapoints wouldn’t be much, but it’s a lot better than 2. I could get more pumped about that if one of the release titles due out this month weren’t straight-up false advertising.

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Fun With Numbers: Attack on Titan’s US Release Sold 11,748 Copies on Week 1

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OpusData BD data for the week ending in June 8th is now publicly avaialble, and since the BD/DVD combo packs are counted as BD releases (as they were for the Fairy Tail movie), that means we have sales figures for Attack on Titan’s part 1 release. The release, which performed the best on amazon out of any US release I’ve tracked in the past 6 months. Assuming the BD/DVD combo packs were counted the same way this company has previously done, Attack on Titan was the 14th best release among US BD content on this week, selling 11,748 copies.

AoT_wk1_us

This actually represents a severe underestimation for my rough-fit model, which pegged it at around 30,000 copies. While it underestimated DBZ season 3’s first week by 20%, this represents an overestimate of more than 60%. It’s possible that the series’ airing on network TV during solicitation made it more of an amazon-heavy title. Most likely, though, this underscores the fact that the model is still rough and prone to error. I’ll be tweaking the model a bit in the next couple of days to see if I can get a model that less severely overestimates this series while still covering the other two points of confirmed data (DBZ s3 and Aria the Natural). I should have at least one more chance to test that model when the series’ second part comes out in late September.

Fun With Numbers: A Good Summer for Hot Cocoa

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This past week was a pretty unambiguously good one for Square Enix’s publishing division, featuring sales of over 95,000 for previously-unranked Isshukan Friends, a boost for the old volumes of Gekkan Shojo Nozaki-kun, and the final volume of Cocoa Fujiwara’s Inu x Boku SS topping the list with over 250,000 copies sold. That last part might not even be the most impressive thing Fujiwara did this week, either. While the 250,000 in IxB sales is, in large part, in keeping with previous volumes of the series, Fujiwara also saw her brand new manga, Katsute Mahou Shoujo to Aku wa Tekitai shite Ita, notch first week sales of over 80,000. While not unprecedented by any means, that level of early sales puts her on a pretty exclusive list.

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Fun With Numbers: Dragonball, Naruto, Love Live, and the Importance of Second-Tier Hits

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Weekly Shonen Jump is Japan’s most successful manga magazine, something that’s been true, excluding a brief early-aughts blip, for upwards of 20 years. But the brand didn’t get there by some fluke – it earned notability by harnessing a number of talented artists in many eras; Go Nagai in the late 60s, Buichi Terasawa and Osamu Akimoto in the 70s, Hirohiko Araki, Masami Kurumada, and countless others in the 80s.

But that doesn’t mean the past 2 decades were free of uncertainty or bad luck for Shueisha. In actuality, in between the early-nineties peak where the magazine’s circulation topped 6 million copies and the modern era of Oda Eiichiro breaking his own volumes’ records on a regular basis, they experienced one of the biggest misfortunes that can befall a publishing empire: two franchise cornerstone series ending withing 13 months of each other.

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Fun With Numbers: August 2014 US Amazon Data (Initial Numbers)

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July’s almost over, and while I’m not totally done tracking releases for that month, I think it’s reasonably safe to say none of them are likely to snag an elusive top 20 BD/top 30 DVD slot – Naruto and Hetalia were the only series to spend multiple days in triple digits and neither cracked the top 500.

This August looks pretty thin in terms of series likely to chart: the only releases currently better than 20,000th are DBZ’s sixth BD set, Love Lab, and Shinsekai Yori’s second half. Tracking them, as always, to add to the dataset and hopefully eventually enable analysis of the US market.

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Fun With Numbers: Short-Term Versus Long-Term MAL Rankings

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Continuing on from my previous post on the notable changes of series popularity over time, I did some similar work on rankings. The shows analyzed are the same (all those tracked in fantasy anime league from Spring and Fall of 2012 and 2013), only this time I’m looking at the evolution of rankings; how series swap places in the rankings over time and which ones rise and fall most significantly. The data used this time around can be found here.

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Fun With Numbers: Short-Term Versus Long-Term MAL Popularity

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Back in late April, I was taking a look at some available numbers which may indicated casual interest in a show, including myanimelist statistics, for the disk sales and print bumps of series aired in the latter half of 2013. In order to get the mal values, I pulled them from the site a couple of days before I posted the relevant articles. One of the comments on this article raised a very legitimate question; how did I know that these values were consistent with the ones a series had in midseason, around the time we would hope to use them to predict print boosts and disk sales before they happened. That was a key assumption – that series’ relative popularity and ratings would remain constant after the end of the season. This turns out to be a bit of an oversimplification, especially for older seasons of anime where things have had more time to change.

Using fantasy anime league data, I was able to go back and look at both the popularity and ratings a show had at the end of a season (i.e. prior to the beginning of the next season). Many seasons of data are available, but I have chosen to focus on 4: Fall 2013, Spring 2013, Fall 2012, and Spring 2012. Note that Summer/Winter seasons are not tracked by fal. This post focuses on my analysis of the evolution of the popularity numbers (collected here) as compared with values taken in late July, 2014. Namely, I want to know if series exhibit significant postseason changes relative to their peers and, if so, which series do so most prominently. I’m still playing with ratings data, and will address those in a separate post later.

Note that Kyoukai no Kanata and Kill La Kill were excluded from the Fall 2013 fal season for understandable competitive balance reasons. Their exclusion is nonetheless somewhat frustrating, as they would have been interesting to look at through this context.

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Lists Are Fun To Make: Master Keaton Episode Rankings

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A week ago or so, I finished watching Master Keaton. It’s a 1998 series from smack in the middle of the golden age of late night, airing on Mondays after midnight on Nihon TV. The series is loosely based around a 30-something professional investigating insurance claims, doing historical research, combating terrorists, or occasionally just being in the general vicinity of someone doing something halfway important. And it’s pretty damn near perfect at it – aside from the 2-part finale, each episode basically starts from scratch in a completely different context and builds a story that is, at worst, unique and engaging. That’s a feat which isn’t too difficult to do once, but gets a lot harder when it has to happen 38 times in a row. I just wanted to spend a little more time thinking about it after finishing the whole thing, so I decided to rank the episodes of the show from 38th (still solid) to 1st (glorious):

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