Anime Sales in Japan - 2011

[HitokiriShadow]

Originally Posted by Westlo

Holy shit Madoka!!! and holy shit fractale I'm also really hoping that zombie is split cour now....

And Hourou Musuko is.... not at all surprising, but still very

[something]

Originally Posted by HitokiriShadow

And Hourou Musuko is.... not at all surprising, but still very

Haha, yeah. I don't really know what "70 points" implies for Fractale, but it seems like the kind of show that could easily shoot up after a particularly good ep. But anticipate it'll end up in the Sora no Woto range - above the Manabi line, but not dramatically.

But I want to know what 70 points means, so I decided to try to figure out what the cumulative Amazon points at the Amazon Stalker really tell us. Obviously others have done this in much more detail before me (in Japanese at the very least), because processing the numbers and coming up with predictions and standard deviations based on past history and all that is how we get those sales prediction lists each season. I don't think we've seen one for Winter '11 yet.

That Amazon Stalker site also has some older data available, which could give some hints as to what ~2500 points means. Here are some examples I've selected - note that this is accurate for BD only, DVD points are calculated differently:

AmaRan Pts - Actual 1st wk - Sales/Pts - Title

65,968　　357,304　　*5.4　　Evangelion Shin Gekijouban: Ha / EVANGELION:2.22 YOU CAN (NOT) ADVANCE BD
31,572　　*77,056　　*2.4　　Suzumiya Haruhi no Shoushitsu BD LE
18,182　　*30,559　　*1.7　　Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuuutsu BD Box
*8,219　　*29,097　　*3.5　　K-ON!! v1 BD
*7,393　　*23,497　　*3.2　　Angel Beats! v1 BD

*4,502　　*15,501　　*3.4　　Tenkuu no Shiro Laputa
*3,877　　*19,385　　*5.0　　Macross F Music Clips Nyan Kuri BD
*2,658　　*13,814　　*5.2　　To Aru Kagaku no Railgun v1 BD
*1,749　　**9,906　　*5.7　　Strike Witches 2 v4 BD

*1,688　　**8,895　　*5.3　　Darker than Black -Ryuusei no Gemini- v1 BD
**,998　　**6,284　　*6.3　　Hidamari Sketch x ☆☆☆ Special BD
**,885　　**5,862　　*6.6　　Yosuga no Sora v1 BD

**,560　　**4,641　　*8.3　　Highschool of the Dead v2 BD
**,425　　**3,956　　*9.3　　Motto To LOVE-Ru v1 BD
**,318　　**3,657　　11.5　　Sekirei ~Pure Engagement~ v1 BD

**,201　　**1,821　　*9.1　　Seikimatsu Occult Gakuin v2 BD
**,136　　**1,371　　10.1　　Ookami-san to Shichinin no Nakamatachi v1 BD
**,103　　**1,000　　*9.7　　Shukufuku no Campanella v1 BD
**,*85　　**1,079　　12.7　　Densetsu no Yuusha no Densetsu v1 BD
**,*50　　***,587　　11.7　　Senkou no Night Raid v1 BD


I tried to include a few per "level", so the top is well beyond where anything from Winter will go; the middle is where Madoka is now and where it may be by release. Yosuga is close to where IS is now. Mostly v1s but not all. Keep in mind Madoka and the rest still have 1.5+ months until release, while I assume the above numbers are the totals as of release date.

At a glance, you can see that the correlation surely is not perfect (Amazon is just one store) and it starts to make less sense at lower numbers, but it maybe gives some ballparks.

A low "Sales/Pts" seem to imply, to a point, that Amazon had higher than average sales of that release relative to other retailers, and vice versa. That or the point calculations favor higher-selling shows, relatively.

Some rough conclusions:

- Higher points usually means a lower ratio (less sales per point).
- Most shows in the 8k+ range tend to sell 5-6 copies per Amazon point.
- K-ON!!, AB! and Laputa seemed to be disproportionately popular at Amazon. Haruhi BD box and Shoushitsu were insanely low in the ratio, indicating that Amazon was clearly the place Haruhi buyers went. Not wholly shocking - steelbook for Shoushitsu and 31%+ discount before release for BD box.

- Lower points usually means a higher ratio (more sales per point).
- Most shows in the 4k or less range tend to sell 9 or more copies per Amazon point.
- Sekirei and To LOVE-Ru sold far less at Amazon than elsewhere, a trend that seems to hold for shows with middle-low sales.
- Hypothesis: otaku tend to pick mid-low end shows (by sales) at B&Ms or specialty stores instead? Well, I suppose that would be true even in R1, where TRSI probably sells as many if not more copies as Amazon US for niche shows. Or as mentioned above, perhaps it's an artifact of the way points are calculated.

So sales and points if plotted on a graph would not share a linear relationship, but rather a slope or sorts. I was hoping OreImo points would be available on the Stalker's site, but no such luck. Most data gets purged on release date. Damn, how useful would a full archive be for data mining? I'm sure someone is backing it up somewhere, though.

What can we guesstimate (somewhat prematurely) about some of the shows we have preliminary points for? Keep in mind these are all first week sales.

Mitsudomoe Zouryouchuu! and below will barely crack 1k BDs, or less.
Gosick through Zombie will sit somewhere along the 1k-3k line if they grow at a basic pace. Basically, they'll be striving for that Manabi Line and it'll come down to if they cause a sudden burst of enthusiasm.
Freezing will be somewhere in 3k-5k, closer to the former probably.
Todoke and Merry will probably land in 5k-7k perhaps. Probably lower for Merry, higher for Todoke, Keeping in mind that Todoke is DVD-only.
IS could settle around 9-12k.
Madoka will be gunning for 15-25k. Depends a lot on what sort of ratio it pulls. I have a feeling Madoka may be closer to K-ON!! or AB! in terms of sales/points. It will score disproportionately high in points relative to its actual sales, with a 3 or 4 ratio rather than 5+ - but it'll still sell great.

They're all going to be potentially subject to sudden Milky/Star Driver shifts, especially Madoka, as we've already seen...

[HitokiriShadow]

Originally Posted by something

- Hypothesis: otaku tend to pick mid-low end shows (by sales) at B&Ms or specialty stores instead? Well, I suppose that would be true even in R1, where TRSI probably sells as many if not more copies as Amazon US for niche shows. Or as mentioned above, perhaps it's an artifact of the way points are calculated.

I'd imagine the store-exclusive bonuses factor into this for the most of them (while a few are just outliers). I'm guessing a lot of the shows that fall into this range are the ones picked up mainly by the hardcore fans of the source material and that group would be more likely to buy at other stores for store exclusive bonuses than shows with a wider spread. Though "wider spread" is highly relative and for the most part probably just means "slightly less insanely obsessive about the show"; its the difference between those of us that buy import one volume of Anime X and those that import 5 of them for all the different store bonuses: we're all crazy, some of us just moreso than others.

[something]

Originally Posted by something

I was hoping OreImo points would be available on the Stalker's site, but no such luck. Most data gets purged on release date.

Well, I suppose one thing we can look at is Vol. 3.

OreImo 3 has 2,122 BD + 158 DVDLE + 5 DVDRE, for 2,285 with 2.5 weeks to go before release. If Vols. 1-2 started at 23,178 and 22,066, let's figure Vol. 3 starts at 20-21k.

Madoka 1 has 2,469 BD + 41 DVDLE + 2 DVDRE for 2,512 with 7.5 weeks to go.

If their sales/points ratio turn out to be similar, then Madoka could be kind of scary (in a good way) if it doesn't start to slow down. Which it probably has to eventually, given the insane rise the last two weeks.

Edit: Amazon Stalker also has predicted final points. It's predicting 7,632 total for Madoka, which would put it in AB!/K-ON!! territory. 3,332 prediction for IS. Only 575 for Merry though, since it's just been consistent rather than spiking. Well, I suppose any prediction ~40 days out is kind of worthless.

[Westlo]

People @ SHAFT must be happy... after Madoka they can finally say that Bakemonogatari hasn't outsold every other show they've done combined.

[something]

Originally Posted by Westlo

People @ SHAFT must be happy... after Madoka they can finally say that Bakemonogatari hasn't outsold every other show they've done combined.

And Aoki Ume will have contributed the character designs to almost half of those non-Bake sales! (Hidamari + Madoka being upwards of 40-50k in combined series averages...)

Clearly they need to work with her more often.

[Suzuku]

Well, we don't combine the points of different SKUs or BD/DVDs because it's not accurate in calculating the sales, and the DVD pt threshhold is lower than the BD (e.g., a BD with only 200-250pt will only sale around 1k copies, while a DVD with the same amount will be around 4-5k). Also, don't use the Amazon Stalker prediction numbers until the volumes are closer to release date, because they operate based on the assumption that the series will maintain the ranking it has for the past couple days for the entire run up to the release of the volume. It's very inaccurate when we're nearly two months away from the release of the vols.

[something]

Originally Posted by Suzuku

Well, we don't combine the points of different SKUs or BD/DVDs because it's not accurate in calculating the sales, and the DVD pt threshhold is lower than the BD (e.g., a BD with only 200-250pt will only sale around 1k copies, while a DVD with the same amount will be around 4-5k).

Makes sense. Todoke should definitely outsell Merry so its points seemed low at 300. For most though it doesn't seem to matter a lot - they're either overwhelmingly BD or the combined total is too low to be worth noticing right now anyway. I've now made a quick note in the post about it not being very accurate for DVD anyway though.

I primarily wanted to get a sense of 1) relative rankings of shows against each other at this point in time and 2) how point totals for already-released volumes correlated to real sales (and that was looking at BD exclusively). The latter especially, to get a sense of what the points actually mean - the trend of low ratios for higher sales vs high ratios for lower sales seems pretty solid.

[something]

Opening post

08/24 - translated
08/31 - translated

09/07 - translated
09/14 - translated
09/21 - translated
09/28 - translated

10/05 - translated
10/12 - translated
10/19 - translated
10/26 - translated

11/02 - translated
11/09 - translated
11/16 - translated
11/23 - translated
11/30 - translated

12/07 - translated
12/14 - translated
12/21 - translated
12/28 - data unavailable

Will update as I do them.

[something]

http://yaraon.blog109.fc2.com/blog-entry-718.html
http://myanimelist.net/forum/?topicid=284389

Preliminary DVD list.

Kara no Kyoukai Epilogue does 18,974 just on DVDs - I'm assuming it also has a BD release? Or was the BD version only in the boxset?

Sengoku Basara 2 Vol. 5 starts at 9,538.