First-look US Amazon anime release data for the upcoming month of February 2015, taken on January 26. Couple of previously-seen titles ranking better than 5000th right now (One Piece, Sailor Moon), while Space Brothers languishes in the dead zone. 😦
If you’ve looked at the myanimelist Top Anime list recently, you’ll notice that it contains anything but an even distribution of franchises across time. As of this writing, 14 of the top 30 come from the past 5 years, and 9 of the top 60 were pieces of animation which aired last year. The 2010-2014 period saw a lot of anime being produced, but as impressive as that amount was, it was hardly 45% of the historical total. Obviously, these rankings have a decently strong recency bias, skewing somewhat heavily towards newer anime. That in itself it perfectly fine. These rankings aren’t meant to be a paragon of good taste, but just to accurately represent how the site’s large userbase as a whole feels about them. This recency bias is a product of several factors: the site’s young userbase, the increasing number of anime being produced (and becoming available via simulcast) in recent years, and (possibly) a change in the quality of the on-screen product. In other words, it’s a product of the value accurately representing what it’s built to measure – overall popular consensus.
The same cannot be said for the same rankings’ strong preference for sequels. Not counting the two which are full-on retellings (FMA: Brotherhood and HxH 2011), 14 of the top 30 are either a continuation or a spinoff of a pre-existing franchise. This sequel bias, a product of non-fans tending to drop a show while fans almost always continue, actively interferes with the pure score’s ability to represent what the average viewer likes, as there is not a single sequel that gets watched by an average sample of the anime-viewing population.
First-look US Amazon anime release data for the upcoming month of January 2015. Nothing interesting in the high-ranking titles right now, but for the first time in a while there’s a release (the A-Channel BD) that’s starting out at 66% off. All initial rank data was taken on December 29th, 2014.
Also, a rarity, I had no releases to track for the final Tuesday in December, so that rank data is done and available here. Cowboy Bebop spent a long time in double digits, and would have a good chance of charting against normal 10k-ish thresholds. It’s up against 40k-80k thresholds, so we’ll see how it does.
Quantifying the tradeoff between two key flavors of anime aesthetics
Small update for 2 relevant releases, which naturally went untracked and thus can’t be fitted to my amazon formula. The first week of sales data for the US release of The Wind Rises is out, clocking in at 53,698 units (40,818 BD/12,880 DVD). A BD release of Princess Mononoke also sold 29,913 BDs (also moving 30,169-29,913=256 DVDs) in the same week.
For some points of comparison, Laputa’s BD rerelease sold 12,611 week 1 copies, From Up on Poppy Hill sold 33,102 week 1 copies, Arietty sold 264,252 week 1 copies, and Howl’s Moving Castle sold 193,006 week 1 copies.
Though there are plenty of sources out there from which one can learn about it, the inner workings of the US anime market are often characterized by what we don’t know. I track US anime releases on amazon because I’m curious about said market. That curiosity has several points of origin, but I chasing after one primary question; do fans buy the titles one would think they buy, to the extent one would think, from their presence on social media?
But tracking US amazon rankings is only useful insofar as these rankings have the potential to correspond to real sales data. And even that’s not particularly useful if the “real” data has the potential to be off by a factor of 100 due to unpredictable factors. One obvious potential contributor to the potential for underestimations are long tails, the combined contribution of totals from all weeks the release doesn’t make the threshold on a given set of charts. These are a very familiar foe when it comes to trying to compare sales figures, and are definitely worth addressing. There’s plenty of reason to believe long tails might be a factor in the US home video market – per-episode prices are much lower than they are in Japan, and thresholds are much higher.
I previously used a trial account to access the lifetime home-video sales totals of various anime movies in Nash Information Services’ OpusData database. Recently, I found out that the companion website to the service TheNumbers, stores years worth of back-data on its weekly charts, though its thresholds are, by design, severely limited compared to those measured on OpusData. Using those charts, it was a trivial task to go back to each movie’s release date and check how much of its lifetime total was accumulated while it was on the BD20/DVD30 toplists. Note that 2 of the 12 movies in the original sample never made said toplists and thus cannot be compared. Results are shown after the break.
This is the fourth week of Battle of Gods’ ranking, and the first week it fell off the combined DVD/BD charts. It still adds ~17,000 BD copies to the running total (DVDs could have accounted for at most ~6000 additional copies this week), which is now 162,228 total copies. That’s about half of Wrath of the Dragon’s lifetime total (332,730 copies), and it could get closer to that figure as time goes by. Sales drop off by a bit every week, so I doubt we’ll see exactly how close it ends up getting.
Also noteworthy is the fact that Hellsing Ultimate did not chart in the same week. This week, ending in November 2nd, contained its release date, and it fell short of the 15,544 copy BD threshold. Possibly well short – my model predicted a much lower figure:
https://twitter.com/Torisunahokori/status/537018991953600514
Anyway, here’s the chart* if you care to look: Source Link
*I realized just recently where TheNumbers’ chart archives are stored, so there’s no reason to screencap stuff anymore.
First-look Amazon anime release data for the month of December. Bold prediction: the Cowboy Bebop box does well enough to chart in a normal week, but doesn’t break the charts because of how ridiculously high thresholds get after Black Friday. All data first taken on November 24.
More sales data, as is kind of expected at this point. DBZ: BoG sold a total of 24,689 copies (18,296 BDs+BDDVD combo packs, with the remainder being DVD versions) on the week of October 20-26, bringing its cumulative total to 144,981 copies sold. As with the previous week, these numbers handily surpass what would be expected from amazon ranks alone, as the best ranks its amazon versions had over that span were 121st and 988th.
Next week’s data should also be interesting, as the final volume of Hellsing Ultimate ranked well enough to be a likely candidate to make the charts, spending all of the weeks before and during its release in (mostly low) triple digits.
Data is currently available here, and is screencapped after the jump.
Pretty much what the headline says. Following a first-week total of 86,735 total sales, the movie added an additional 29,558 units to its US sales total (now 118,280) in the week of October 13-19. These second week sales consisted of 21519 BDs (including BD/DVD combo packs) and 8039 DVDs. It’s already interesting enough to mention how non-frontloaded these sales were, though DBZ is possibly an exception to the norm for anime releases; it remained in the Amazon top 200 for 5 days of its second week out, while most other anime releases are lucky to keep out of 5-digit rank territory.
The strength despite the lack of preorders also points to a possible heavy non-amazon bias for DBZ – its amazon versions were, at best, 86th and 677th in rank during the relevant week, yet it was 14th in actual total video sales overall. It’s very possible a large fraction of those copies were moved via b+m retailers.
Screencaps of the relevant charts (which can also be found here while they’re available) are included after the jump.
Animetics 