Forum - View topicAnswerman - Why Aren't Anime Sales Figures Made Public?
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mgosdin
 Posts: 1302 Location: Kissimmee, Florida, USA |
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There was a time in the 1990's when units sold numbers were being reported like gospel truth in the computer software business. Likely the numbers were just "WAG" guesses, but they were a big thing. I remember the negative consequences that impacted several software vendors when it came to light that they had "Stuffed" the channel to inflate their numbers and there were wholesalers & retailers sitting on massive unsold inventory.
Something like what happened in the Anime collapse of the 2000's, a lot of that inventory eventually working it's way back. There's no upside to the Anime producers in having accurate sale figures in the public's hands. In the end if the producers don't sell or stream enough the public will know because they will have to send everyone home, turn off the lights & lock the doors. Mark Gosdin |
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ultimatemegax
 Posts: 412 |
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One issue I've had with these estimates isn't necessarily that the fans are using them for making their own statements, but that they're taken by media sources as reliable and used as marketing for the product instead. I constantly see news sites like MantanWeb (Japanese online news site) and Yahoo Japan (though a subcontractor's writer sometimes) cite Oricon estimates for music and video releases and promote how well it's doing each week. It's tough to say "these aren't accurate" when credible news agencies are promoting them.
In that sense, I do applaud the staff here at ANN for consistently saying "ranking" and "estimate" instead of merely writing "sold" or "sales" for the weekly Oricon reports, though that habit goes away for the mid-year and yearly rankings from Oricon. I used to follow these estimates closely, but they're simply one piece of the pie and not the full piece either. I can understand Western fans applying disc sales as the important piece since US (and likely other) licensors primarily made money from selling discs/tapes instead of other revenue streams prior to streaming (though bigger titles did get some broadcast revenue from TV stations). However, that mindset doesn't apply to the profit sources in Japan where different companies earn money through different revenue streams and as such a show could be a success for some companies, but a loss for others. A large percentage of fandom still hypes up disc sales as the only determining factor for success despite the wealth of new knowledge being distributed by people in the know and that needs to be changed. |
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Desa
 Posts: 285 |
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And here I was thinking it was just deja vu:
animenewsnetwork.com/answerman/2016-07-27/.104704 (almost exactly one year ago!) I really don't think knowing these numbers alone would allow one to go "Ah so THAT'S why we never got a sequel to [insert show]" or something along those lines. Sure how well something sells is very important but there are many factors that affect what gets made, along with who, when, where, how etc. |
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subforry
 Posts: 21 Location: Hermosa Beach, CA |
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Its not just anime. Do we know the sales or profit numbers for the nearby 7-Eleven. No, even if you worked there you would only have an educated guess or estimate but not exact numbers. I work for a large company and I only know rough scales of sales and contract sizes (small, med, large).
That being said, it would be interesting to know these number and I sill look at movie profits as an indicator of likelihood of a sequel. |
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Hoppy800
 Posts: 3331 |
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This is true, NGNL has no season 2 (although it got a prequel film and Hataraku Maou-sama! which sold close to 10k, but didn't get a second season for reasons other than sales). Some series rely more on music sales than anime disc sales (Idolmaster for example and Love Live to an extent), and there are many anime that depend mostly or almost exclusively on merchandise sales. |
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GeorgeC
Posts: 795 |
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The sales figures have to be monstrously low now... I wonder how any company thrives with the remote likelihood any show will actually appear outside of a warehouse now.
Over half the anime has to be getting sold online now because Best Buy doesn't stock well over half of it. Best Buy is about the last national chain stocking anime in a significant video section. Locally, there may be better stores with greater selection but for many of us there really isn't anything other than Best Buy or online purchase. GKids and the Ghibli titles are another thing but they exist on a more mainstream level than most of the anime TV series and movies... Heck, I still see a lot of the GKids titles get carried by Wal-Mart stores (for a few weeks at least) and those are the farthest from "anime specialty" stores out there! (Seriously, about the only anime I see at Wally-World besides Sailor Moon and Dragonball Z are feature film releases. WW has never had the most diverse video offerings, period, but they're particularly bad where anything NOT Joe Six Pack is concerned...) The stores that DID stock a significant number of non-Bandai, non-Viz, non-Funimation, non-ADV product are LONG GONE... The whole Suncoast-Media Play-Sam Goody-Musicland chain went belly up and very few of the locations were taken over by FYE after Musicland bankruptcy. I know from elsewhere CPM's largest retail client was Media Play so they were pretty SOL when that company got into trouble its last few years of existence. Between the MP group and Borders Books, there were a LOT of unpaid bills the vendors had to eat. I think Borders was at least 3/4 of a billion in debt to book/media suppliers when they finally folded their stores. |
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CatSword
 Posts: 1489 |
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Wal-Mart's anime selection has gotten better in the past year. They'll temporarily stock any new Funimation release that isn't ecchi/super niche it seems for a few weeks, and they seem to consistently carry popular titles like Attack on Titan, My Hero Academia, One Punch Man, etc. It's also worth noting that Books-a-Million has an anime section in-store right next to the manga. It's mostly Funimation's most popular titles and Ghibli movies, but still a retail supply. |
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Primus
 Posts: 2831 Location: Toronto |
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Sometimes anime makes Nash's site. For example, last week:
[DVD] 16 new Boruto: Naruto the Movie - 11,532 / 11,532 $304,445 / $304,445 1 [BD] 17 new Boruto: Naruto the Movie - 9,610 / 9,610 $264,273 / $264,273 1 http://www.the-numbers.com/home-market/packaged-media-sales-chart/2017/04/02 |
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Tenebrae
Posts: 493 |
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Isn't that also how all console makers reported, and probably still report, their unit sales? I seem to recall reading that especially Microsoft was notorious for stuffing the channels with xboxes to be able to show nice sales numbers. |
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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I don't know if you'd consider it a local chain or not (it's certainly regional though), but Fry's Electronics continues to sell a good amount of anime on home video. It's not as much as it used to be, but I see most of the major titles there, and it's the only retailer I've seen to sell stuff from Sentai. I've been to a Walmart here and there too that sell anime titles here and there that are more obscure than Sailor Moon. They aren't REALLY obscure, but I was surprised to see One Piece: Film Gold there, for instance.
Blame that on the heads at K-Mart and their ludicrous incompetence and total inability to keep their subsidiaries financially stable (as well as K-Mart itself). |
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Greed1914
 Posts: 4681 |
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That is what I've observed at my local WalMart, too. The reason I found out that Viz had released the K movie was because it was on a Walmart shelf. Honestly, I was impressed that there was more than DBZ and Naruto. I have to think that it would not be in a companies interest to not publicize sales, especially where the duds are concerned. Retailers will be able to keep track of their own inventory, and customers could easily assume that a poor seller sucks and look no further into things like whether the anime was niche enough that it was never going to be a major seller. |
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TarsTarkas
 Posts: 5962 Location: Virginia, United States |
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There are still some Suncoasts out there, not many though. Many large Military Exchanges have good selections of anime that surpass that of Best Buy. Though my local Best Buy has been gradually increasing their selection of anime over the last couple of years.
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#861208
Posts: 423 |
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Do you think part of why people want to know is because they're used to seeing video view numbers on youtube, and they don't understand the difference between that and Crunchyroll?
. . . . . not even joking, I would have just stood there staring at Shiro for hours, he looks so gorgeous on that cover. My precious. |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Nah, this desire for numbers long precedes Crunchyroll or even YouTube. I'd bet it's because of box office numbers for movies, which come out quickly, are very precise, and are frequently covered by the news and blogs. And this has been going on for at least a few decades. Heck, go to Rotten Tomatoes and the numbers and rankings will be sitting right there on the upper-left corner. |
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Amiantos
Posts: 345 |
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I remember the last year or so before ETSing out, the Military Exchange on the base I was at had a pretty decent chunk of anime with both DVD and BD versions of a series. |
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