Tag Archives: Anime

Fun With Numbers: CD Singles’ Loose Disk Average Relation

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As it does with many others, anime is somewhat intertwined with the music industry. One of the biggest production outfits in the business, Aniplex, is a subsidiary of Sony Music Japan, whose music labels typically get first dibs at on involvement in a show that Aniplex has greenlit. Even outside of shows with blatant music themes tied into vocal superstars, the relation between a show and its associated singers is an interesting topic for study. Previously, I took a look at how a series’ OP/ED CD sales corresponded to the presence of a visible boost in print source material. This time, I’m going to take a look at the same CD sales data, but compared with disk sales.

Specifically, I’m looking at the week one sales of a series’ first opening single and first ending single, via the myanimelist news board.* That is, when they’re both on sale as individual CDs and not bundled with disks like the openings to the second season of Monogatari were (in such cases, I only counted the one towards the average). If a CD didn’t chart, I put it down as a dash and counted it as a 0. If a CD contained both the opening and ending theme, I put that total as the average. Data for disk averages for each show in 2013 is taken from someanithing. It was pulled a couple weeks ago, and it may be slightly out of date, but should be fairly close to the current values. The analysis can be found here, and is summarized below. Note that I decided to exclude series with episode lengths under 20 minutes from the final sample.

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Via Newtype USA: Rie Kugimiya on Being Alphonse Elric (December 2004)

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Normally, I don’t scan voice actor interviews, because they’re mainly canned puff bits on emotional connection to the character. But this one contains an interesting fact – Rie recorded her FMA lines in a separate room from the rest of the cast, to give Alphonse’s voice a more hollow sound.

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Via Newtype USA: [inside] AIC (December 2004)

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Along with an understanding of the broader context of the subject, the most vital ingredient to good anime coverage is a reliable source. So when US journalists actually interview people on the production side in Japan, it’s generally worth noting unless the interview consists entirely of fluff. This is the latest of what will hopefully be a couple more posts archiving articles from Newtype USA’s [inside] series of articles written by Amos Wong. In this feature on AIC, president Toru Miura discusses starting up during OVA boomtime and how the studio landed the original Ah My Goddess job in a 3 studio race, while Hiroaki Goda discusses his taste in music and getting a chance to do Ah My Goddess again with more development. 

Note: Pictures are scans of the article made on my crappy scanner, which cover the article text but not the entire page. They’re also in greyscale, because I’m interested in archiving interview text and color scans make the process more of a headache than it needs to be. Apologies for that. Scans after the jump, along with comments on the contents of the article.

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Fun With Numbers: May US Amazon Data and Attack on Titan’s Nonzero Shot at the US BD Charts

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Amazon data for the series I was tracking in May is here. It’s largely unremarkable; only 4 series spent prolonged periods of time ranking in the quadruple digits, and 3 (Yugioh, Fairy Tail, and DBZ) were long runners.

More interestingly, Attack on Titan started soliciting this week. If my calculations are correct, it has a very real chance of snagging a spot on the BD charts in the US, becoming the first anime release to do so since I began tracking series this February.

Note: While what follows is based on data I have gathered, it is largely speculative and makes a number of assumptions, among them that amazon performance is indicative of the BD/disk market in the US and that anime does not perform significantly differently from other types of titles in similar places in these rankings. These may well be way, way off, so take it with a heavy dose of skepticism.

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Fun With Numbers: Print Sales Bumps and Poking at the Demand Curve

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It’s fairly common for manga or light novels getting an anime adaptation to receive some sort of boost in sales after the anime airs. However, both the presence or size of those bumps varies widely. These bumps represent an interesting opportunity for study, since they represent (potentially) an alternative indicator of both the financial impact of anime, as well as a look at the broader-scale demand curve for franchise-related goods. Not everybody can or will easily pay 30,000 yen for a full special-feature-laden set of disks, but such casual fans could still have a big impact on a series if the manga is within their price range.

The real fascinating part of this, though, is that casual fans need not support at all. While one almost certainly has to watch a show to be willing to buy the disks or even the manga, the reverse need not apply. The fact that the relation between disk averages and print boosts is so fragmentary implies a potentially similar disconnect between print bumps and total interest generated by a show.

In theory, sales should be better represented by casual indicators of popularity as costs get lower. In practice, the statistics are pretty garbled, though they do offer a hint as to which sorts of series may end up with bumps at the end of the day. To attempt to better understand the junk described above, I broke down 4 categories potentially indicating no-cost and low-cost popularity, and compared their ratings with the print-bump successes of series which got anime adaptations in Summer and Fall of 2013. Note that while I originally used Torne rankings in the earlier analyses, I discarded the data because of how incomplete they were.

For the purposes of this article, a “significant boost” is one where a series experiences a 20% jump in sales or charts for the first time after the anime. All figures are for a volume’s first 2 weeks of sales, calculated with the average of the 2 most immediate before and after volumes, if 2 volumes of data are available in each case. Be aware that this is not a comprehensive measure of which series got boosts, just one intended to at least catch the biggest ones. 1/3 of all series got such a visible bump, meaning the null-hypothesis accuracy rate these indicators need to beat is 66.6%~67%.

In addition to the previous top 5/10/15 tests used for v1 disk sales, I’ve also included histograms of how successful series were scattered across the indicator. Ideally, they would all be 60th percentile or better, but reality isn’t quite that nice.

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

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Here’s the usual infodump post of initial numbers for the series whose June amazon ranks I’ll be tracking, gathered from this list of upcoming releases. As before, May data is still being collected and will be posted when that’s done in about a week.

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Fun With Numbers: Anime as Light Novel Advertisments in 2013

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While light novels work a bit differently from manga in several key ways (stronger second-week showings, lower thresholds, etc.), they similarly often see big boosts after and presumably due to from anime adaptations. I collected the light novel sales history of the series to get anime adaptations in 2013 on this doc, and plotted them on the charts below, to illustrate which series did and didn’t get visible boosts.

This post doesn’t cover series with no post-airing releases (Maoyu, Uchoten Kazoku) or no pre-airing releases (Free/High Speed).

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Fun With Numbers: Anime as Manga Advertisments in 2013

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The commercial impact of anime goes well beyond its disk sales. Manga may sell to more people, but anime is extremely visible, airing on TV (albeit often late at night) and propagating around the internet at a very rapid pace. This visibility very often can lead to an increased strength of the franchise in general, propping up sales of print material, figures, and any various other related goods. Sometimes, anyway. 2013 was no exception, and saw a number of manga adaptations have anywhere from minimal to explosive effects on the sales of their source material.

I collected the manga sales history, including thresholds for series which charted sporadically, on this doc, and plotted it below. Note that these sales are not total, but the total number reported in a roughly fixed time period. Comparing sales tail length is a whole other issue, and I’m trying as much as possible to compare like figures.

One important difference from similar breakdowns of 2011/2012 series is that here I’ve opted to use the total sales from a series’ first 2 weeks of release (the highest reported total in that time interval), to attempt to minimize the effects of a bad split in creating artificial variations. It’s still an issue either way, but the difference between 9 and 14 days is a lot less than the difference between 2 and 7 days.

Two important series-specific notes prior to the plots. First, Maoyu is plotted here, in the manga section, because the manga charts more consistently than the light novel did and, more importantly, has available data from both before and after the anime aired (the LN ended just prior to 2013). Second, I can’t parse impact for series that don’t have at least one volume which released after the anime began to air. I thus will not be covering Servant x Service here, though there is data available. I will cover it in an addendum post come September when volume 4 has been out for 2 weeks.

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Fun With Numbers: Myanimelist Stats’ Correspondence with the Summer 2013 Disk Over/Unders

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Quick recap: I’m taking a look at various no-cost indicators of popularity for anime and their related goods. First, I’m checking how well they correspond to disk sales by checking whether different applications of that statistic beat the null “every v1 will sell less than 4000 disks” accuracy criterion for a given season (66% for Fall, 59% for Summer). Later I’ll check how well these indicators corresponded to boosts in manga/LN source popularity (for works that were originally LN/manga), to contrast their predictive abilities at both high-cost and low-cost levels of interest.

This entry covers the myanimelist rankings and popularity for the 34 Summer 2013 shows I’ve been looking at, with the title tweaked to reflect that these are the series rankings from several months after the series have ended. It shouldn’t be a huge factor; positions don’t shift radically that often, especially after a series is done airing (more research on that forthcoming). The data I gathered can be found here, and the results are shown below.

Summer2013-mal-compCompared to Fall, Summer showed a relatively weak performance by the mal metrics. The popularity component still does alright, but the the rankings consistently underperform the accuracy of the null hypothesis. This is more in line with what I would have expected going in; there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that casual audiences aren’t that different inside and outside of Japan, but there’s a very relevant degree of separation between casual audiences and disk-buying ones. Too, a series’ aggregate score being less important to sales is unsurprising, as the series profile of “publicly lambasted but successfully appealing to its target audience” is exceedingly common in any medium.*

*It’s a principle potentially less applicable with nico rankings because they represent the subset of people watching via nico streams, which can be a qualitatively different audience from one that DVRs episodes and/or stream through other services.