Tag Archives: Licensing

Fun With Numbers: April 2014 Amazon Data (Initial Numbers)

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US amazon data may not be a perfect source, but it is a very interesting one, with a lot of organic components. I’m just about done collecting data for March releases (data for the 18th will be up when my schedule permits, data for the 25th still needs to be collected), and while these datapoints have managed to shed some light on a few of the narratives I pulled out of the February data, they’ve also raised still more interesting threads to be explored.

That means it’s in my best interests to continue collecting data both to broaden the sample and to give predictions a viable testing ground. All numbers posted here were collected on March 25th, via amazon’s upcoming anime releases page, one week before the earliest releases on the list.

Note: The price I note is the series’ MSRP price. If the series becomes listed at more than 50% off that price at any time during the amazon solicitation, I will note that both now and during the final analysis. The February part 1 release of Robotics;Notes had such a discount, along with Psycho-Pass and One Piece (all Funimation releases, which is probably noteworthy at this point).

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Fun With Numbers: March 2014 Amazon Data (Initial Numbers)

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Way back in December, I started a rough, bare-bones look at a bit of publicly available data; US Amazon TV/Movie bestseller list rankings for anime releases. That data collection is mostly done, pending K’s release this Tuesday, and it yielded some potentially interesting nuggets (expect that summary post to happen before this next weekend). Enough so that I plan to do the same at least for the month of March. This is a list of the releases I’ll be tracking over the next 30 days, with their release dates, prices, and initial rankings. All series were accessed via amazon’s upcoming anime releases page.

Two points before the list itself:

-I compiled my February list too early (several titles were only announced for release after I built my list), and missed the opportunity to track some releases that way. Since most titles tracked in the February sample were relatively steady and very low on the list until a week before release (save for Robotics;Notes’ ridiculously discounted edition), I’m going to start tracking monthly rankings approximately one week prior to the first set of releases from now on.

-The price I note is the series’ MSRP price. If the series becomes listed at more than 50% off that price at any time during the amazon solicitation, I will note that both now and during the final analysis. The February part 1 release of Robotics;Notes had such a discount.

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Fun With Numbers: The February 2014 Amazon Experiment (Initial Numbers)

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I present few results here; I’m mainly just laying the groundwork for something I hope will bear fruit at the end of the titular month.

As you may know, I’m very interested in the intricacies of the market for Region 1 anime releases, and I’ve looked at the problem from a few different angles. There are sources for this sort of thing, but I’d rather start building a cache of available numbers than just rely on word from ANNCast, likely reliable though it is, that certain series did “well” or “break-even”. This post is the raw beginnings of an approach on this problem, though at this phase of things I’m mainly interested in finding indicators that seem accurate.

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Fun With Numbers: Licenses Matter (If You Know Where to Look)

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The Summer 2013 has presented rich discussion fodder, giving rise to a number of interesting talking points. My favorite one is still the one on the merits of the core comedy in high-school life series that Free has sparked. This article is about one of those questions, one which is more complicated than some might think; Why did The World God Only Knows get a sequel? Based sheerly on anime sales, it’s a very risky proposition; season 1 literally just hit the profit line with an average 3000 sales per volume, and season 2 was well below that, averaging only 2117 per volume. If it made any contribution to manga sales, it was one of questionable value. Aside from one special-edition release that came with a bundled OAD, the manga sales don’t show a big jump after the anime airs. It’s a late-night anime, too (aired at 3:20 in the morning), so it’s not getting any help from TV ratings/ad revenue. So why are we looking at the third season of an anime whose second was already on shaky ground?

The answer is that that ground is not, in fact, quite so shaky. Once one considers the additional impact of licensing dollars, some sequels that look like iffy business make a lot more sense.

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Fun With Numbers: License to Spend

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Ever wonder how much it costs to license anime? Well, thanks to this article on ADV’s bankruptcy proceedings, we now have some idea of what the costs are.

A more interesting question is this: where do those costs come from? Is there some factor that predicts how much companies are willing to shell out?

Using this page to compare with per-volume Japanese sales (22 of the 29 titles are listed there), we can get some idea of whether American and Japanese anime markets actually overlap.

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