Fun With Numbers: Anime as Manga Advertisments in 2012 (and their respective myanimelist ranks)

Update 2 (July 15, 2014): New, more accurate data is here.

Update (Jul 1, 2014): This post doesn’t measure releases in 2-week totals, which turns out to be a huge deal in many, many cases. I’m currently working on an updated version of both this and the 2011 data. Just be aware of that before citing the data from here regarding any one show.

By all rights, a 30-series sample like the one I had for 2011 was enough to get most of the relevant information regarding how anime boosted manga sales. However, during that analysis, I bumped into an incidental correlation, myanimelist ranking versus gain in manga sales, that was far too juicy to ignore. If that correlation is real, it points to a very tangible link between the Japanese mainstream community (who have enough disposable income for manga but not for anime) and the English-speaking online community (who generally pay a comparable pittance, if anything, for the anime they watch). But I couldn’t be sure from just the 2011 data, since that was the sample that gave rise to the theory. So I did what any good researcher would do, and pulled another year worth of data to see how things would match up. The results can be found on this spreadsheet, and are sorted in order of descending myanimelist rank below.

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Fun With Numbers: Thermae Romae, Curious Outlier

One of the interesting tidbits that fell out of my research on manga that got anime in 2011 was the surprising coincidence of high (1500th or better) myanimelist rankings and increased manga sales. At least, it was intriguing enough that I decided to delve into it further, pulling sales figures for the 20 manga which both got anime and charted on the Oricon rankings in 2012. The full analysis is coming, but, short version, there’s a 90-plus percent that that correlation is a very real thing, indicating a strong link between the opinions of myanimelist users and the Japanese manga-buying public, to the extent that I might even be able to plug it in to my sequel probability equation and get the “can’t predict loss-leader effects” monkey partially off the sequel probability equation’s back.

All of which makes Thermae Romae, which presided over a 100k+ increase in week one sales of its manga while posting a piddling rank of 2248th on myanimelist, a case worth a closer look.* Is the jump in average week-one sales from 222,000 volumes for 3 and 4 to 323,000 volumes for 5 and 6 indicative of the effects of the anime, which began and ended between the releases of 4 and 5? Continue reading

Fun With Numbers: Inu x Boku SS and Anime As a 20-Minute Manga Commercial

Following up on the impressive (well, to me) discovery that Inu x Boku SS is Square Enix’s top manga, I had another thought. It went something like this; “Well, that anime was pretty darn good, and I know it sold a fair amount of Blu-Rays. I wonder if that has anything to do with how successful the manga is right now?” And so I took to the Oricon rankings, checking for shows from Winter and Spring 2012 that came from manga source material, and looking to see if they experienced a boost in sales. So I put a lot of numbers into a lot of spreadsheets, got distracted by the Saurday anime slate, and made a lot of graphs. If you’ve ever wondered why manga publishers sponsor anime, this should be an entertaining read.

InuxBoku-b2

So. Much. Paper.

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