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.

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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?

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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.

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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.]

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