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Forum - View topicComparing Japanese and US Anime Viewership: Spring 2024
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FishLion
 Posts: 167 |
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I'm not surprised that anime here doesn't get marketing pushes. I can't remember the last time I heard anything about anime in the US that wasn't from a friend or a niche space that was intended for fans of comics. It's kind of sad considering there is so much more to anime I never learned until I got old enough to seek it out myself, I really appreciate ANN giving me such a broad view of the medium so I can hear about and check out more series than ever before, there are dozens of shows I never would have checked out otherwise.
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AdditionalRamen
Posts: 34 |
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This is so interesting! I am most curious about this:
Where the piece says "In the US, anime viewers outnumber manga readers by nearly 2:1," does that refer to all series or just Demon Slayer? And where do those numbers come from? (i.e., how do we know how many people in the US read manga? Just from official sales numbers, or something else?) This is also my first time learning that manga is more popular than anime in Japan. Keep these kinds of analytical articles coming! |
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chronium
 Posts: 290 Location: Canada |
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It definitely is referring to all series. |
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Akamaru_Inu
 Subscriber Posts: 102 Location: Florida |
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I would love to see more data and charts about popularity in the US vs Japan over the last few years, I find that kind of stuff fascinating! It's always so interesting to me to hear about series that have caught on more over here.
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Minos_Kurumada
Posts: 1169 |
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There is something really important here, there is actually a crucial difference between occidental vs japanese history telling, the concept it's quite long, so I am gonna make a TL/DR:
- Occidental history telling is based in the famous Freytag Pyramid, where the plot its written with a central conflict being the main focus. - Japanese is based in a form of history telling where the central conflict its either not necessary for the plot to exist or is non existent to begin with called KISHOTENKETSU. This means series with a more recognisable central conflict tent to be more popular in occident, since that's what we are used to. |
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mdo7
 Posts: 6353 Location: Katy, Texas, USA |
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Hm, this is interesting to read along with the information included. Yes, I'm also starting to notice not only Japanese animation gaining more viewership in the US, but also American/western adult animation have seen rises in viewership by 150% and also production too. So amongst Netflix's blurring the definition of anime thanks to hiring and outsourcing to both Japanese and Korean/East Asian studio. Yes, there is a correlation between the rise of American/western adult animation and increase in viewership in Japanese anime in the US/North America when it comes to audience viewership.
One thing I'm impressed about adult animation that are coming out in the last few years is that their storytelling (aside from comedy) can be match on par with anime (any of you watch Love, Death & Robots on Netflix, does it give you Robot Carnival vibes?). There have been couple of times that I've seen people name-dropping and recommending Robot Carnival to people that watch Love, Death & Robots, meaning anyone that watch that Netflix show and have never watched anime (outside of the Pokemon, Dragonball, Naruto, any mainstream shonen titles, etc...) are probably going to be seeing (and exposed to) more lesser well-known/mainstream and obscure anime titles. So for me, here's hoping that the rise in adult animation along with jump in viewership in current anime could lead to people re-discovering older adult-oriented anime OVAs/films from the 80's and 90's (you know the big OVAs era), meaning I hope Angel Cop, Violence Jack, Genocyber, Bio Hunter, Wicked City (or any of Yoshiaki Kawajiri's directed work), etc... may find new life and fans in current era of people watching anime and American adult animation. I think a lot of the stuff found in adult animation made in the US might translate to these OVAs might appeal to those same audiences. |
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NeverConvex
Subscriber Posts: 2456 |
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Do you all do anything to try to adjust for people who view bootleg anime having systematically different tastes from anime viewers as a whole? e.g., seems reasonable to expect some correlation with age and income. Maybe hard to try to adjust for that just based on what's available on the bootleg sites directly, but your firm also does other kinds of survey work, right? Maybe you could leverage relationships estimated in them to adjust the aggregated data for representativeness, or at least to test how sensitive the major patterns are to possible deviations from representativeness. It's kind of ironic/disappointing that bootleg sites seem to be a better source of data like this than the big, legal streaming platforms. Wish the source data were more widely accessible; would love to play with it. That was quite interesting, thanks! |
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Brack
 Posts: 287 Location: UK |
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Why do we have what feels like a consultancy firm's powerpoint presentation as editorial?
The second chart is the worst graph I've seen in years. Not only no metrics, there's no axes. |
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whiskeyii
 Posts: 2265 |
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Honestly one of the better places to understand this is, surprisingly, YouTube. Web articles get a touch academic for my taste and too abstract to really convey *how* kishotenketsu is actually used in media. But it's also important to clarify that kishotenketsu doesn't lack for narrative tension, just that it's applied somewhat differently. Rather than having the need vs. want approach that occidental storytelling uses, kishotenketsu uses what I can best describe as the "M. Night Shyamalan" approach, despite that being a terrible name for it. Rather than peaking with a climax, kishotenketsu replaces this with a subversion or "twist" meant to give the viewer a new perspective on the story or character. Supposedly, this is also done (or at least attempted) in serialized manga chapters right before the very end of a chapter to generate an interesting cliffhanger and keep readers invested. |
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2632 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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The chart tells you exactly what you need to know. It's a gradation of what's "More popular in Japan" vs. what's "More popular in the US", so it's not a simple X & Y axes calculation. The top left point, as the arrow literally points at, would indicate an anime in which all of its popularity is in Japan, while the bottom right, as the other arrow points at, would indicate an anime in which all of its popularity is in the US. Therefore, the further up & left something is the more popular it is in Japan when compared to the US, the further down & right something is the more popular it is in the US when compared to Japan, and anything in the diagonal area going from the bottom left to the top right would be popular in equal measure in both regions, i.e. 50/50. So, for example, titles like Archdemon's Dilemma & Konosuba Season 3 are notably more popular in Japan than they are in the US, while titles like Wind Breaker & Kaiju No. 8 are the direct opposite by being more popular in the US, though overall most of the titles on the chart are closer in equal popularity between both regions, with only minor pushes toward one side or the other. |
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Brack
Posts: 287 Location: UK |
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Well I'm glad the chart worked for you. It's still the worst chart I've seen in years.
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NeverConvex
Subscriber Posts: 2456 |
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I'm pretty sure it's just identical to the first chart (or maybe a slightly modified version of it) but with the Demon Slayer outlier (and the axis labels) removed, and a gradient added in Photoshop or some such? There are not very many good reasons for removing axis labels (and ticks) from a graph. I'd guess it was an oversight, or maybe created more for marketing purposes than clear exposition.
I do think it has a bit of this feeling to it, but I guess I forgive it since it brings a seemingly novel (if pretty opaque) approach to gathering data and analyzing quantitative trends in anime. There's so little of that, it's hard to be picky. 
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AdditionalRamen
Posts: 34 |
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Okay, thanks. As a manga reader in the US, I check out most of my manga from the library (both physical and digital copies, including through Hoopla/Libby/ComicsPlus). I also subscribe to the Viz Manga/Shonen Jump apps and use Manga Plus. Occasionally I buy manga, and occasionally I read scans. I suspect there are a lot of manga readers in the US who have a similarly haphazard way of consuming manga, which is probably not fully captured in sales numbers. So I am curious where Miles's numbers are coming from and wish we had gotten some citations. |
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Ermat_46
Posts: 737 Location: Philippines |
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The axes has been removed because the colored graph is just the first graph with Demon Slayer removed. If you put the axes back in, the Japan will go from 0 to 100, while the US one will go from 0 to 48. That's how bad Demon Slayer skewed the numbers on US side. |
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The_Daytona_500
 Posts: 98 |
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With this article heavily focused on streaming numbers for ABEMA (since most show's TV numbers aren't released), the article forgets to take into account ABEMA pre-air shows leading to those shows essentially getting bigger numbers on streaming than they would have otherwise. Last season Maou no Ore ga Dorei Elf wo Yome ni Shitanda ga, Dou Medereba Ii? (or Achfiend's Dilemma or whatever you guys call it) was aired a week earlier on ABEMA than on TV, so in Japan it had higher numbers than most shows. Yes, Crunchy matched that release date in the US, but we have no alternative to watching it so whether CR streams it a week early, on time, or later so it wouldn't affect the western numbers.
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