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Population of anime fans in the US and Japan.

One key indicator: anime DVD sales in 2007 are estimated to be in the range of $275-300 million, out of a total DVD sales of around $16 billion in the U.S. last year. (These figures are taken from various new sources, including ANN and USA Today.) That amounts to 1.7-1.8% of the U.S. market. Given that anime DVDs are more expensive per unit than normal DVDs, and that anime fans likely buy many more DVDs per capita in a given year than the general public, I feel my figures above are probably reasonable estimations.

Anybody feel special and unique yet?

If you take the $300M, and divide it by $20 (figuring between online and B&M, an average anime dvd costs about $20) you get 15M units. I believe in that same article it said there were about 600 different anime releases- so that would mean that the average anime title sold about 25,000 copies. Going back to the US population estimate of 300M, (hey- that's a dollar per capita on anime dvds in a year! I digress.) that would be 0.08% of the population. Keeping in mind that those are huge assumptions and seriously hand-waving arguments, I wouldn't be surprised if the number of people who buy dvds were actually in the neighborhood of three or four times that amount- I'd be stunned if I bought 150 anime dvds last year. (But my wife wouldn't, you'd think I spent all of my paycheck on anime, booze, and cheap women the way she talks sometimes!) But that would still be 0.32%, which is pretty close to the 0.2%. I don't think it would be all that outrageous to say there are twice as many casual fans as hobbyists. I think I saw at some point that something like 300,000 people watched an average episode of Naruto? That'd be about 1%, wouldn't it? Factor in some portion of the other 0.32%, we're still less than 1.5% of the population.

First off, I think you're figuring a bit on the low side with average anime DVD prices (hardly everyone's going to be buying them at the best price, and art boxes, boxed sets, and other more expensive releases are going to balance out the cheaper ones).

Also, when they're talking about releases, they're talking about individual volumes, not "titles." And third, 300,000 is .1% of 300 million, not 1%.

But let's suppose for a moment that you're at least generally on-track and we have around 13.5 million units. Supposed further that the average hard-core purchasing fan is picking up 50 units a year (which I honestly feel may be a low number, since I've personally been around or over 100 each of the past three years). 100,000 people purchasing at that rate gets you 5 mil units, 500,000 people purchasing an average of 10 units each gets you another 5 mil, and 1.2 mil purchasing just 2-3 units each on average gets you the rest. That still totals to only about .6% of the population. Include the fans that never buy anything and you're close to that 1% - and, honestly, believing that there are 3 million people in the U.S. actually at least occasionally watching anime seems a little optimistic to me.