Tag Archives: Fun With Numbers

Fun With Numbers: Dragonball Z: Battle of Gods Sold 86,735 Copies on Week One

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So yeah, the most recent Dragonball movie sold a healthy amount in the US: 24,589 DVDs and 62,146 BDs (including BD/DVD combo packs), for a total of 86,735 copies. Even if it doesn’t immediately top the US totals of the series’ older movies, that’s quite a lot. For example, it’s over ten times that of One Piece Film Z’s first week total.

To reiterate, that’s a huge number there, possibly large enough to have a second week and definitely large enough to sandblast parts of my still-in-development formula (which pegged it as closer to 20,000 in likely first-week sales). Best guess at this point is that some combination of being a movie, ranking extremely highly for an anime release, and being from the most popular anime franchise the US has ever seen pushed it closer to the storefront-heavy curve for mainstream movies, as opposed to the amazon-heavy curve other anime releases have seemed to follow.

At any rate, screencap after the jump (original chart here while it lasts).

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Fun With Numbers: One Piece Film Z Sold 6,199 Copies on Week 1

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Another datapoint from the late September-early October rush of titles with early ranks made the charts. This time, it’s One Piece Film Z, a release split between DVD and BD/DVD combo pack sales that totaled a little over 6000 between them in their opening sales week. You can check the full list here while it’s up (screenshot after the jump).

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Fun With Numbers: Scrolling Comments As a Function of Time

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If you’ve immersed yourself in the culture surrounding anime more than a little, you’re probably aware that Japanese video sharing sites operate their comment sections a little differently from the way Crunchyroll does. For the uninitiated, while sites like Youtube stick their comments underneath the video for viewers to scroll down and see if they want to, sites like Nico Nico Douga have user-submitted comments scrolling across the same screen playing the video. I personally prefer this style of commentary for a variety of reasons,* and I sometimes miss the feature when transitioning to official releases. Just recently, I realized fully functional logs of these comment tracks are actually available for download at himawari douga, a fairly large** and in-no-way-legal video streaming site.

These himado comment tracks have a particularly neat (if totally necessary) feature – each comment keeps its 1/100th of a second timestamp, which usually corresponds fairly precisely with the thing in the video being commented on.*** Thus, these tracks, properly analyzed, have the potential to provide an interesting window into which moments in an episode most engage the audience. I built a very basic code**** to analyze the data, and I came up with some fun plots.

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

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I took these data yesterday, so the rank data tracking for November releases starts on October 27. I’m kinda down and swamped at work right now, so this is just going to be a post without much comment. If any of them looks like a possible to chart, or actually does, then I’ll be talking about them again.

P.S. Sherlock Hound/CCS got their releases pushed back a week and require an extra month of tracking as a result. I hate that.

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Fun With Numbers: The Long and Short of 2013

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“How many pages long is the average light novel?”

A friend of mine flat-out stumped me with this question a few days ago, and I’m willing to bet even odds it stumped you too. Neat, right? People familiar with anime likely have at least some vague inkling about what light novels are. But anime-focused writers who offer sweeping takes on light novels often don’t have the answers to those sorts of basic trivia questions, and I’ve forced a few acquaintances to google over this in the past week.

Granted, this particular question is sort of misleading; wordcounts are more accurate quantifiers of length than pagecounts, since the latter depend on size and typeface. Still, it underscores how little people can know about something which plays such a big role in the anime industry. Too, the question is also ridiculously basic to answer; I only had to spend about an hour on amazon compiling a list of links to the first volumes of novels adapted into anime in 2013 (excluding sequels), and taking down their given pagecounts. And while I was at it, I did the same for manga. The data, source links included, can be found here, and is summarized below. Note that Uchouten Kazoku, a single-volume novel, was counted as a novel along with the other multi-volume series.

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Fun With Numbers: Industry Valuation of In-Betweening vs. Voice Acting

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Note 1: Corrected to account for more typical anime framerates (8-12 fps), rather than 24 fps.

If you’re going to be making a piece of animation, you’re obviously going to need some animators to draw some things. But anime budgets are tight, and the production costs in the industry are such that animation might not always be the best way for directors to maximize the bang they get for their buck. Anime salary data is pretty sparse, but I found enough information on certain costs to do a quick, naive calculation comparing the relative worth of in-between animation and voice acting.

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Fun With Numbers: Visual Novels, Pseudonyms, and the Mainstream

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Among other things, this Fall season features a pair of intriguing visual novel adaptations, Grisaia no Kajitsu and Daitoshokan no Hitsujikai. The two are somewhat dissimilar titles, but have quite a bit in common on paper; both series are quite popular (the franchises took the #4 and #1 spots in they getchu 2013 rankings, respectively), and have already won their share of hardware (Grisaia at the 2011 moe game awards, Daitoshokan in the 2013 getchu user awards). Perhaps even more interestingly, both series ostensibly swapped their original PC voice casts for new ones in advance of the anime. I say ostensibly because they didn’t actually swap their casts out at all; the same people who have been doing the voices for the franchise from the beginning will be doing the voices for the anime adaptations. This is also the case for the third non-Fate VN adaptation of the season, Ushinawareta Mirai wo Motomete. In practice, the reasons for these name swaps are fairly straightforward – voice actresses tend to avoid using their real names when voicing works that contain adult content.

Looking into recent history, I found a number of such cases where the original VN cast dropped pseudonyms to work on the anime version, with such titles making up a plurality of non-sequel VN adaptations over the BD era. That same history suggests that some combination of factors contributes to higher odds against them making it big as anime.

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

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October figures to be an interesting month, the second in a row headlined by multiple releases likely to chart. The most obvious is DBZ: Battle of Gods, which has the combo pack at 138th place a week before release. GitS: Arise and Hellsing Ultimate also have respectable probabilities of ranking given good thresholds; Ultimate is basically in the same position Steins Gate was in a month ago, and that release encouragingly broke into the lower 200s today.

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Fun With Numbers: Appleseed Alpha Sold 11,093 R1 BDs in Week 1

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As you may be aware, I track US anime releases on amazon, ostensibly to get a rough idea of how much particular lower-end titles might be selling. However, the titles I track each month come from amazon’s anime tag, which is not always applied to all anime-related releases. That’s what happened with the US release of prequel movie Appleseed Alpha on July 22 of this year. This is an issue because the BDs of this movie sold over 11k units in their first week on sale, via TheNumbers. It’s a lost opportunity because I could have used it to test predictions, but the datapoint itself is still somewhat interesting in its own right.

AA’s total is only 655 fewer copies than that of Attack on Titan’s first set, and that’s without accounting for the fact that the movie’s release was split between BD and DVD versions (as opposed to AoT, where the release was a BD/DVD combo pack counted as BD sales). Attack on Titan may well have the longer sales tail, though; it’s currently ranked at 1,022 while Appleseed Alpha fell back to 6,819 in Movies and TV. It’s worth noting the potential contrast between the two fanbases, one older (and presumably salaried) versus another younger and more casual.

(A screencap of relevant week’s BD sales chart is included after the break.)

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Fun With Numbers: The Big Range of Big Underestimates in Oricon Weekly Manga Totals

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One thing I can’t say enough is that data should be interpreted with a healthy amount of caution and second-guessing. This is especially true for manga charts, when a combination of ridiculously high weekly thresholds and the desire to have fast data on the effects of currently-airing anime can lead to some very incomplete and erroneous interpretations of the facts.

I’ve already done a few case studies on how Oricon and publisher claims can differ for series where the publisher boasted of some particular print total (usually in an insert on a volume of the series or a magazine). Those cases are enlightening, but not necessarily general, since there’s a heavy element of volunteer bias involved in which series get their totals reported. Recently, though, I found a fairly large list of distributor claims of print volume totals (via Shuppan Shiyou, see post #99 here), which contains latest-volume printing data for over 100 series published in 2013. It still isn’t totally general, but is at least a tad more representative of manga at large. In order to get a better idea of how much Oricon underestimates the “average” series, I took the weekly-charts total for a volume and compared it with the given print total for the same volume. The results of this comparison (which can be found here) highlight some large and inconsistent discrepancies between the Oricon figures and the official publisher totals.

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