If anyone here is interested, I recently finished a major overhaul of my data analysis project on these rankings. I supplemented the ANN data here, going back to 2007, with the original Video Research data going back to late 1996, on both their own website and the Wayback Machine. I'm considering making some more revisions, but I'm still pretty pleased with what I've accomplished.
It's been a lot of work, but I learned a lot about dealing with different kinds of messy data and making it all into something you can actually draw useful insights from. The Video Research data includes some variations in column names, combines broadcast time and length into one column, uses several different date formats and two names for NHK-E, has a bunch of variations in web design that make it hard to pick out the right table, combined seven episodes into two rows for that New Year's 2011 marathon of Major… plus there were three weeks in 1997 where they had the date and station columns mixed up. There was even a page where one erroneous bit threw off my ability to extract the table. And then you get into all the errors introduced in the translation process over the years.
In the Anime forum here, I summarized some of my findings:
| I wrote: |
- Most of the top titles aren’t the names with wide recognition overseas. No surprise to those of us who follow those charts, but worth mentioning.
- There used to be a lot of anime airing from 7-8 PM, especially on weekdays, that got big numbers. Most of those timeslots are gone now. Some big-name anime that aired in them moved to other timeslots over time — Detective Conan, One Piece, Doraemon, Crayon Shin-chan. Saturday morning and late afternoon ended up being where a lot of those ended up.
- The diversity of titles in the weekly rankings has been highly variable, but it peaked in 2006 and has been on an overall downhill trend since.
- Late-night anime is much more common on the charts than it was just a few years ago — back in the day, Nana was the only one that charted on a frequent basis. (Though the bulk of what we see there nowadays is Demon Slayer or Friday Anime Night, both of which air before midnight.)
- Saturday morning is for preschoolers’ shows on NHK-E. Sunday morning is for action shows.
- Live viewership numbers have dropped significantly over the years (no surprise).
- Surprisingly, Detective Conan used to rank higher than Sazae-san several times a year back in the late '90s. In 2001 that dropped to twice, but it continued to happen once or twice a year through 2004. After that, the next time a regular anime episode (as opposed to a 100-minute-plus special) topped Sazae-san was in 2016.
- The average ratio of “individual rating” to “household rating” has measurably increased since Video Research started reporting the former in 2020, possibly a mathematical result of declining household sizes.
- Looking at average individual/household ratios for each year, there's some interesting patterns. They're consistent enough from one year to another that I’m convinced they’re meaningful, but I’m not sure how to explain all of them — I guess with Maruko-chan and the pre-Conan shows, there’s a sort of “opening act” effect where one person will be watching the first program, then another member of the household or two will join them once the more popular program after it starts?
- Pokémon Horizons, Sazae-san, and the NHK-E kids’ shows have especially high ratios, which I guess reflects parents watching with their kids.
- Soreike! Anpanman, Gundam: The Witch From Mercury, and shows in the pre-Conan slot have low ratios, as do most late-night anime (Demon Slayer’s is higher).
- Detective Conan and Doraemon get similar ratios, with Doraemon’s a little higher most years; Pretty Cure gets higher ratios than them, but not as high as Chibi Maruko-chan’s, which are in turn lower than Sazae-san’s.
- One Piece is fairly low by the standards of the family shows, but middle-of-the-pack overall.
- The Digimon Adventure remake, Digimon Ghost Game, and Run for Money: The Great Mission have done really poorly by the standards of their timeslot.
|
I do have one question for Rafael, or whoever oversees this column here. Is there a particular reason ANN doesn't include Video Research's figures for individual ratings? They seem to be the current standard, and I can see that conscious efforts are made here to reorder these rankings by household rating. For instance, in the original table for this ranking, you can see that Chibi Maruko-chan was placed above Detective Conan, Doraemon above The Apothecary Diaries, and Pretty Cure above Blue Miburo.
|
