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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Over the next 3 weeks, I’ll be tracking a few older, popular anime releases with entries in the OpusData database in an attempt to relate middle and low-tier amazon ranks with smaller increases in sales totals. The database seems to update concurrent with added individual weeks for BD and DVD formats on TheNumbers (which is run by the same company). The hope is that, when the sales figures update for the relevant week, I’ll know exactly when those sales happened and be able to put both an amazon number and a sales number on the same time period. Thus, I should be able to get as good an idea of how amazon ranks relate to total sales as I possibly can. We’ll see, though; this could just as easily result in nothing of value.

For transparency, here’s the list of 12 titles, 22 releases on my list. It’s rough, just the titles and their different editions, ranks on August 24th, and links to the amazon sales pages.

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This September is a month with 5 Tuesdays, and it’s a crowded month anyway, so it’s packed to the gills. Noteworthy for the usual “high initial ranks mean it just might make the charts” reasons are Space Dandy part 2, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, and the 3-edition release of Tokyo Ghoul.

Also, there’s some weirdness happening this month:

-Descendants of Darkness isn’t ranking yet, for whatever reason. Hopefully whatever issue is causing that will clear up before its release date is really close.

-There are two Jojo editions, both getting preorders, both DVD-only, same MSRP, identical except for the level of detail on the amazon page and the level of discount offered. For now, I’ll refer to them on the tracking spreadsheet by their amazon url codes (B00X5UIUEU and B00XYHOIIQ).

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