I’m ending the US Amazon anime tracking project as of this month (i.e. September 2017 will be the last month I track). It had a good 3+ year run, and I learned a lot. Mainly, though, I just don’t feel like continuing it anymore. It was always a personal interest project and the interest is no longer there.
Posts, docs, and this blog will remain up indefinitely, and I may decide to post here from time to time, but I have no plans to do anything here in the immediate future.
Here are the releases currently scheduled for September. It’s a pretty light month, with only 20 releases and nothing starting out in triple digits. Gakkou Gurashi/School-Live’s LE release was pushed back a month again, after originally being scheduled for release in July 2017.
Ok, serious time for a second. This might be the last month I collect this data. There’s no technical issue, I’m just rapidly losing interest in the project and it doesn’t seem to be useful to anyone else. If I’m wrong about that second part, please tell me.
Data was first taken on August 28th, 2017.
August is another light month, with 26 total releases. The only particularly interesting release is Shokugeki no Souma (starting at 21432/7161). World War Blue didn’t rank on DVD until my second day tracking it (July 25th). Amazonj stopped labeling releases as BDs or DVDs in the title, so I labeled em all as [BD], [DVD], or [BD/DVD] myself.
Data was first taken on July 24th, 2017.
There are just 26 releases I’ll be tracking for July. There are some new series, most notably Monster Musume, breaking into the top #1000 a few months before its release.
Data was first taken on June 26th, 2017.
There are only 34 new releases in the anime tag for June, at most. I’m not sure if it will stay that way, as Amazon has made some changes and listing choices which make it generally more of a pain in the ass to pull data:
-The Origin movie special edition, slated for June 27th according to Funimation’s website, is not given a release date on Amazon and is listed in “Industrial & Scientific” rather than “Movies & TV”, as Dimension W was for a short time last month. Its ranking will be meaningless so long as it remains in that category, but I’ll keep an eye on it to see if it switches.
-Gakkou Gurashi and Chivalry of a Failed Knight have Collector’s Editions coming out a month after the main release, and thus were not in chronological release order. I’m lucky I checked the full list of upcoming releases, which I will continue to do to try and nip future instances of this in the bud.
-YGO: Dark Side of Dimensions has 3 editions, a DVD, a BD, and a pricier BD, but the pricer BD didn’t rank as of yet and caused an error in my tracking system for the first 2 days, causing me to miss that, the Gakkou Gurashi releases, and Origin data until May 31st. Hopefully that’s not a major issue, but I marked where I use May 31st data like so: [$60 (-33%); 97780]*
-2 May releases, a Lupin movie and SeHa Girls, were added after the May data was taken, so I’m including them here.
Data was first taken on May 29th, 2017, except for the last 5 entries.
This is a big, big month for US releases. 45 total, and 3 already are breaking triple-digits in the rankings (One Piece Film Gold, Gundam 08th MS Team, Speed Racer).
That’s not even counting the first Digimon tri film, just a hair outside the triple-digit zone at #1104 on BD (~65 copies a day) and #8764 on DVD (~39 copies a day). This is the first thing I’ve really cared about (best Ghibli film Only Yesterday doesn’t count because I only watched it recently, 6+ months after the US release) to track with a good possiblity of making the top 20 since I started 3 years ago. Don’t do anything to ruin my moment. The BD version was ranking in the top 300 2 months ago as it got a surge of preorders from the stream of part 4 of the same series. That top-300 ranking, at a minimum, is worth 240 a day. Assuming it spiked for 1 week and the DVD/BD sales ratio was proporitonal to what it is now, that’s 400*7+100*60=8800 copies from preorders without counting its release spike. The BD threshold for the public top-30 chart this time last year was 10,057. I *may* be livetweeting its stats daily, so check my twitter (@torisunanohokori) if you care as much as I do. If not, well that’s certainly not cool, but you do you.
Data was first taken on April 24th, 2017.
April is a bit of a light month, with only 29 releases, none of which are in the top 1000 to start. Not much to say here, I’m far more excited to see how Digimon tri does in May (that baby’s already in the top 500 with over a month to go).
Data was first taken on March 27th, 2017.
This is a fairly minor bit of news, but it’s a benchmark that’s at least mildly noteworthy. Kokoro Connect was rereleased as a full 17-episode series in both BD and DVD formats on March 14th, 2017. The TV and OVA series had previously been released in separate collections. This particular collection is noteworthy because the DVD version has thus far gone unranked among products on amazon, indicating there have been zero preorders or purchases of the product. The initial price was the MSRP of $60, but, on the 17th, the price was cut by 33% to $40. On the same day, Amazon began listing that there were 5 copies remaining in stock, and the collection remains unranked. So there you go, one solid example of how much DVDs initially stock on Amazon. It may not be indicative of the overall market as a rerelease, but this minor discovery takes us from 0 datapoints to 1.
I may be able to analyze data in the future and see how typical this is, but there isn’t much point in going back to the past – I don’t currently grab “only X copies left in stock” messages, since they appear inconsistently.
Six months ago, I took my amazon data and banged out rough sales projections for the first half of 2016. Just recently I found the time to do the same for when the region in question made an unusually high number of terrible decisions motivated by the hate that apparently fuels a depressing number of people.
Disclaimer: In this post I’m going to do some funky stuff with data that research has led me to believe I can reasonably do, plus one very uncertain gap-filling reach. BUT I don’t have any inside information and I could make mistakes here in a number of ways.
Amazon’s anime tag contains 36 releases coming up this march, plus they added a BD re-release of 5cm/s at the end of February so I’ll be tracking that as well. Currently ranking above #5000 are 5cm/s, Miss Hokusai, the Ghost in the Shell movie, the Steins Gate movie, and the Is It Wrong to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon BD set. That final item has a much higher starting point than Trinity Seven did in August 2016, and I’m currently projecting that one to be the best-performing new TV series release in the second half of last year, so I’m very interested to see how high it gets.
Data was first taken on February 27th, 2017.
Animetics 