Tag Archives: Fun With Numbers

Fun With Numbers: Various Case Studies of Oricon Manga Charts Versus Copies in Print

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Oricon manga reports tend to fall well, well short of the “actual” values reported by publishers. I’ve written before about one of the most extreme cases (Yuruyuri’s one million copies with 0 weeks in the charts), but there are plenty of others out there. This isn’t a comprehensive look at it (and these series may or may not represent “average” cases of underreporting); it’s just me picking a couple confirmations and counting up the total (i.e. total on weekly charts from last week a volume appeared) Oricon reported sales up to the point when the publisher reported a given number.

Some of these may simply be unsold copies, another part may represent copies sold at a 10k/week rate in the long-tail shadow of the charts, and a few may come from the overseas sales Oricon chooses not to count. How to separate those three is anybody’s guess. I’m not trying to do that, just give some idea of how big these gaps can be.

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Fun With Numbers: First-Week Sales Rough Guesses for June 2014 R1 Releases

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Since February, I’ve made it a habit to track R1 anime releases on US Amazon, hoping to get an idea of how sales figures look for specific US series. I recently finished up taking data for the month of June (available here).

Recently, that study seems to have begun bearing fruit. Combined with assumptions about the positions of their blu-ray top 20 versus the overall top 20, I was able to come up with a power law approximating how much a day ranking on US Amazon was worth in terms of disks sold per day (#=300,000/rank). Recently, I got my first substantial bit of proof that this prediction method was at least somewhat viable (to within +/-20%), and I’m at the point where I’m ready to put out very basic estimates of what first-week sales figures for various releases should look like for those series released in June.

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Fun With Numbers: Print Boosts’ Effect on Sequel Odds

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It’s been well-established that an anime adaptation of a manga or light novel can be a huge boon to the source material. What’s a bit less obvious is whether or not boosting print material can fuel the production of a second season of said anime.There are at least a few reasons why it shouldn’t; for a manga get adaptation boosts primarily from the first season – afterwards, their sales tend to plateau or drop off (even if the series does get a second season). It makes sense on an intuitive level that there would be some sort of diminishing returns on subsequent seasons of anime; sequels tend to sell between 0% and 50% fewer disks, and people don’t tend to start watching anime from the second season onward. But whether or not those diminishing returns carry over to print sales, and if so to what extent, is a somewhat separate question.

In this post, I’ll be exploring that question, comparing the rate of shows getting sequels with and without print sales boosts over different ranges of disk sales, to get an idea of whether or not print sales boosts actually “matter” towards a show’s sequel odds.*

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Fun With Numbers: Two-Week Revisions of the 2011-2012 Manga Adaptation Data

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This post took long enough to put together as it is, so I’m dispensing with the intro.

2011 data

2012 data

Read this for why I redid the existing 2011 and 2012 plots. New plots are after the jump, but first, a quick summary of the major changes:

-Whether or not Zetman and Thermae Romae got significant boosts is more dubious.

-On the other hand, Maken-ki, Deadman Wonderland, Hyougemono, Brave 10, Joshiraku, Sankarea, Acchi Kocchi, Squid Girl, and Yuruyuri all look like more probable boost recipients than before.

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Fun With Numbers: Shogakukan’s Non-Homegrown Power Pair

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One of the biggest differences between manga and western comics is the format in which it runs. While both are eventually released as collected volumes, most western comics will be first distributed in single-chapter releases, whereas manga will be first distributed in various magazines together a number of different series. The magazine model works out nicely for publishers – people pick up a magazine to read a series they’re massively into, and all of a sudden tens to hundreds of thousands of people have a chance to get a look at whatever new artist you’ve just debuted. Occasionally, that young artist ends up becoming a smash hit themselves, and you’ve got more people reading your magazine and more chances to develop more hits (while at the same time hopefully being nice to the rest of your authors).

In order for this model to work, though, you need to have people buy your magazine, and in order to buy your magazine, you need a hit series. This was a problem for manga industry mainstay and Weekly Shonen Sunday publisher Shogakukan. In 2010, they were shut out of Oricon’s top 10 manga series, and had only one series (Detective Conan, 3 times) even make the top 50 volumes that same year.

Flash forward to 2013, and they had 2 of the top 6, Magi and Silver Spoon. It’s a really impressive turnaround, even given that simple top-whatever lists fail to capture the beautiful breadth of the manga industry. How it happened is worth taking a look at, not in the least because parts of how it happened are fairly intriguing in and of themselves.

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Fun With Numbers: Anime as Light Novel Advertisments in 2010

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2010 was a year with fairly thin pickings in terms of light novel/novel adaptations. I counted less than 15 new series with books as a source, and 4 of them (Tatami Galaxy, Katanagatari, MM, and Shiki) were done before the adaptation came out, limiting our ability to measure their impact. Thankfully, there was only one series that ran through the anime and didn’t chart; Asobi ni Ikuyo. There’s a wealth of data for the other 9, though.

In any event, the pre/post-anime two-week sales totals of the light novels for which they’re available are recorded here and plotted below.

Note that, for Shinrei Tantei Yakumo, I was tracking the editions of the volumes reissued under Kadokawa; it was originally published by Nihon Bungeisha in the early 2000s, and later had one new volume (9) released before the reissuing finished. It’s irregular for a lot of reasons. Continue reading →

Fun With Numbers: Anime as Manga Advertisments in 2010

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I’m adding the 2010 manga-adaptation anime into the sample of adaptation effects on their source material. Many, though not all, series show some degree of significant bump. Nitty-gritty data is collected here, and displayed below. An impressive 20 of the 26 series I looked at made the Oricon charts at some point, though one of them (Rainbow) ended before the anime began. One that didn’t, Seikon no Qwaser, is still running at 8 years, 18 volumes (it’s hardly the only series to run that long without charting, I’m just pointing out that manga can run for a long time without seeing the light of day chart-wise).

Note: For High School of the Dead, both volumes 4 and 5 came out well before the anime, and volume 6 came out during its broadcast. The gap in time was so big that they came out before mal tracked numbers for series, only posting top 10 lists. I used the available 2008 manga data to approximate the average value, in volumes, of the #10 slot to get a rough estimate of the threshold. Even holding v4 and v5 to the maximum threshold from those weeks, the 130,000 v6 and 200,000 v7 it puts up post-anime is evidence of a significant bump.

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Fun With Numbers: Two Weeks Are Better Than One

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For a couple of reasons, I’ve been going through the manga and light novels first adapted in 2010 to gauge if and how their sales changed after the anime adaptation aired. This data is currently being gathered (manga info is collected, but it needs to be turned into plots, haven’t started on LNs). Before diving into an analysis of those boosts, though, I’ve noticed a very important point that pertains some specific earlier posts of mine. Namely, first week manga sales, while rarely smaller than second week sales as is common with light novels, aren’t all that consistent.

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Fun With Numbers: Directors With Blockbuster Chops (Part 2: 2 Shows)

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Continued from part 1, here are the rest of the directors that managed to notch multiple credits on 10,000 plus per volume hits. 13 guys directed two non-sequel hits, which, adding in the 4 from before, gives a total of 17 people in the history of anime to make this particular list.

As before, note that while anidb and ann are being used, they are potentially incomplete sources. For example, Tsuda Naokatsu only receives Uta Kata production assistance credit on ann. I will generally give direction credit to anyone who is listed as a director on one of the two sites, and directed a plurality of the episodes. Series director vs. plain Director titles for shows that gave the two to different people were tricky to interpret – I opted to give the title to the staffer listed as just director.

An Important Note About The Classification: I only included non-sequel anime when looking for directors. This means nothing with some manifestation of a 2 in the title. Ditto for Gundam or Macross franchise entries after the original. My rationale is that it’s a lot harder to make a prime-time anime from scratch, even with popular source material, than it is to continue living in a house you or someone else built. I count A Certain Scientific Railgun and Mononoke as spinoffs rather than sequels, as the series they spun off of are considerably less well-established franchises.

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