These are the weekly manga sales charts for the first four months in 2016, via myanimelist news, continued from the 2015 post. If you want more recent data, there’s plenty of places where charts are available (eg. ann, the mal news forum I get them from).
Format:
news post url
week of data
Place. [Weekly Sales] [Total Sales] [Series+volume #]
These are the weekly manga sales charts for the first four months in 2015, via myanimelist news, continued from the 2014 post. I’ll be doing one of these updates every 4 months; if you want more recent data, there’s plenty of places where charts are available (eg. ann, the mal news forum I get them from).
These are the weekly manga sales charts for the first four months in 2014, via myanimelist news, continued from the 2013 post. I’ll be doing one of these updates every 4 months; if you want more recent data, there’s plenty of places where charts are available (eg. ann, the mal news forum I get them from).
Edit: Added data through August 2014.
Edit 2: Added data through December 2014.
Weekly Oricon Rankings for manga, continued from the 2012 post.
Weekly Oricon Rankings for manga, continued from the 2011 post.
Weekly Oricon Rankings for manga, continued from the 2010 post.
Weekly Oricon Rankings for manga, continued from the 2009 post. Continue reading
Weekly Oricon Rankings for manga, continued from the 2008 post.
Unlike Light Novels, where doing any kind of research pretty much required making an easy-access database, research on manga sales was doable with existing web databases. When looking into it 6 months ago, I used animenewsnetwork’s related news stories for various manga to access sales charts where given series appeared. Unfortunately, those link libraries were often incomplete, and I had to employ a ramshackle method where I used One Piece’s constant presence in the Oricon ranks to get to the release week for a given series and determine whether it charted or not and what the threshold was. It was boring, menial work, but it was never boring or menial enough that I got turned off of my end goal.
That said, I can see the effort involved in that method being prohibitive for a lot of future research. And, if possible, I want to be talking a bit more about manga (both as an industry and as a creative process) in the near future. So I collected the myanimelist weekly sales charts for manga in a similar fashion to how I did for Light Novels, deciding to post them here again to make it easier for other people who want to take a quick, easy lookback at how different manga evolved over time.
Once again, this is not my data. It was originally collected by Snowical, dtshyk, and symbv of the myanimelist news team, who have done excellent work.
The argument that diversity in a medium benefits fans is a pretty simple one, which can be made several ways. From one angle, it’s good to have a lot of series selling well because then the medium is safe financially if one superhit series ends. From another angle, it’s good to have a lot of series selling well because that means the industry can experiment more, finding the sweet spots of niches that might fall through the cracks if the industry was mostly dependent on 10 or so series earning 80 percent of the total income. I mean, it’s good to have those sort of “carry the team” hits, but an industry solely dependent on established blockbusters is going to be in trouble when the big guy’s fuel tank runs dry if they don’t have some sort of farm system in place to generate another crop of them.
When a market has strong diversity, one of the ways it manifests is in a rapid turnover rate in bestseller lists from week to week; series in the top 10 one week will be quickly pushed aside by new releases. Particularly in front-loaded markets (i.e. ones where the majority of sales take place over the first 2-3 weeks of release), it’s a very discouraging sign when a given week’s slate can’t even beat the runoff from last week’s. Since manga is a market where the thresholds for charting are ridiculously high and hard numbers are almost totally unavailable outside of Japan, this turnover rate is one of the few ways we can start to compare the two markets.
Animetics 