Tag Archives: Manga

Weekly Manga Sales Charts For 2008 (September-December)

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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.

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Fun With Numbers: The Decline of US Print Manga Sales and Who Might be Buying into the Digital Manga Boom

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I’ve been over this before, but it bears repeating – print manga in the US is a lot more like anime in Japan than it is manga in Japan; it’s expensive, with a relatively small customer base. Manga in Japan only costs anywhere from 400-900yen, small enough that marketing to elementary school kids with their weekly allowances is a plausible strategy. In the US, the cheapest print manga start from $9, and can cost quite a bit more. This makes manga in the US a smaller, more exclusive market. At that price point, the proposition of just buying a $60 anime box set (there’s a pretty understandable overlap between the fanbases) starts to look a lot more appealing.

In more practical terms, manga was perpetually being walloped by anime in the US market. While the total gross of all manga tracked through bookscan in 2007 was just a hair under $109 million (all gross totals from that article unless otherwise linked), the total gross of anime DVDs in the US in that same year was over $300 million, a number surpassing not just the manga total, but the $183 million gross of the entire US comics market that same year. While more recent statistics regarding anime are hard to come by, that still speaks to a huge contrast in US sales potency for an industry where the 2013 annual gross of One Piece by itself (18,151,599*500~9 billion yen) tops the total of the top two averagers of the post-Evangelion era (Bakemonogatari and Madoka sold about 6.5 billion yen worth of disks between them).

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Fun With Numbers: Comparing US Print and US Digital Manga Markets

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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.

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Unstoppable Hype Machine Winter 2014 #5 – Witchcraft Works

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Grab it!

Welcome to Unstoppable Hype Machine, a podcast where Drew and Sam discuss what shows they are looking forward to in the next season! There will be five in the first season of USHM with one going up per day! First up on the discussion plate is Witchcraft Works, a new comedy directed by Tsutomu Mizushima!

Lists Are Fun to Make: Questions I’d Like to Attack in 2014

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If you read this blog on a regular basis, you’re probably aware that one of the things I enjoy doing is going through various available numbers (anime sales, manga sales, myanimelist rankings, and the like) related to the anime and manga industries and trying to use them to gain insights into particular trends in both the industry and the fanbases it serves. It’s not easy work, nor is it flawless. There are a bunch of questions that very quickly became difficult to address in the short term (involving either no apparent path to the answer or a very long, winding path to the answer) and got shelved. Here’s a peek into the short-term reject file of issues/technical concerns still bugging me that I’d love to be able to resolve and analyze now that I’m ditching my weekly by-episode anime blogging.

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