Quick, before you read... how many anime fans do you think there are?
| Like a lot of people, I dont really go around openly telling everyone how much I love anime, and I rarely buy anime related stuff, so it's safe to say that there are plenty of "fans" around the world that aren't represented in sales figures, polls, whatever facebook stats, or such. |
Guaporense said: Ricequake said: Actually, it's much less than one million in Japan. A lot of people assume the largest market is in Japan, but in reality that's not the case: Japan has pretty much no people lol No, Japan is the market for anime. The anime industry in Japan was 260 billion yen in 2006, 30 billion yen came from foreign sources, 230 billion yen was from the domestic market, that's 89% of the revenues of the anime market are in Japan. The world outside of Japan is insignificant for the Japanese anime industry and the 30,000 people directly employed by the anime studios. The US is probably around 3% of the global anime market in terms of generating studio revenues (I think because most of the money stays with the distributors, out of the 30 billion yen from foreign sources, I guess 1/3 comes from the US) and the number of anime fans in the US is also probably a very small fraction of the number in Japan. If you want a comparison, in the US manga sales in 2012 were 12 million volumes, in Japan it was 600 million volumes. Disk sales are not comparable because in Japan most people watch anime on the TV (which they may have recorded on the TV), downloaded or rented (in Japan people almost never buy movies or TV series, they rent movies and TV series), so comparing disk sales is not a good measure of the size of the fandom. Yeah, I don't think that sales are a good indicator anyways. Think pirating/illegal reading and watching of anime and manga online. Not gonna lie, I've done it a couple times (especially when I was a bit younger than now) and I'm not proud of it. The number of Anime fans in the US in proportion to the population is lower than in other countries and certainly much lower than in Japan. Think of an hardcore anime/manga fan in Japan is the same as a hardcore movie fan in the US, most Americans are not hardcore movie fans but most Americans watch movies regularly. Though as I said before, in the US the population who watches anime is either: 1 - hardcore fans or 2- never watch any of it. Other countries have it different. I guess that about 5% of the global anime fans are American maybe less. Yes and no. That's like saying people who watch cartoons from their own culture can be considered hardcore fans of it. Of course Japanese people watch Japanese cartoons! That's a given. But which people are OTAKU is the question? To be truely hardcore about it... in reality the number is quite small. The sales figures is mostly due to small children and teens who watch it, but later in life don't care for anime. In Japan watching mainstream anime shows like Sazae-san is like watching How I Meet Your Mother in the US. Watching Miyazaki's films is like watching James Cameron or Steven Spielberg films in the US (3 out of the 5 highest grossing films in Japanese history are anime, 14 out of the 30 highest grossing films in Japan from 2009-2013 are anime and 8 out of the 16 highest grossing live action films in Japan are based on a manga or anime series). One Piece is read by a larger proportion of the people in Japan than Harry Potter books are read in the US. Sazae san? I wouldn't consider Sazae San an anime, any more than you'd call Hey Arnold an anime (though Japan certainly would). Nor would I compare it to HIMYM, considering that Sazae san has run for so many years. I'd compare it more to The Simpsons. And I would compare Miyazaki films more to Disney films, given Studio Ghibli's status. The One Piece comparison is interesting though. Where did that statistic come from? O.o Manga represents the largest single element of contemporary Japanese culture, more manga is read in Japan than novels. Manga sales in Japan are higher than sales of novels, videogames, movie tickets and sales of DVDs+Blu-Ray. As Miyazaki said, manga is the starting point of Japanese popular culture. Anime and live action films and TV in Japan are mostly based on manga. Yes. This is indeed true, but most of those sales numbers are due to kids and super-otaku who feel the need to buy everything ever. :P Japan's population is very large, around 41% of the US's population, it's the second largest industrialized country by population, that's why they have an animation industry that produces so many shows and movies, they have a large market to support it. Yeah, 127 million people. But they're losing more than 200,000 people a year due to a severely low birth rate. In just a few years, they'll hit 126 million, and the natural change in population gets more and more negative every year. If nothing is done...... Um... sorry. Off-topic. Anyways... yeah, it has a lot of people. But 25.2% of them are old people (65 years or older), and 13.4% of them are children 15 or younger. This leaves only 61.4% of them as candidates, since the kids would naturally watch anime and the elderly... it's unlikely that they do, though I suppose somewhat possible, due to Astro Boy and a few other ancient relics of anime's birth. But yeah, 78 million. Then you take into account the percent that aren't otaku and the number shrinks significantly to less than 2 million. Then it shrinks even further when you specify anime, down to the thousands. So although Japan indeed has a great number of people, most are too old, too young, or too disinterested in anime to count. The statistic you're thinking of includes idol otakus, computer otakus, scifi otakus, etc. Not just what we think is "otaku" here. Otaku means nerd in Japan, however, it's probable that the majority of nerds in Japan watch anime in the same way that the majority of nerds in the US play videogames. Anime otaku means anime nerd and the Japanese even use the word Otaku for fans of a specific series ("Evangelion Otaku"). Yeah, it's pretty much like the word "fan." Doctor Who Fan, Anime Fan, Game of Thrones Fan, Rail Fan, etc. "Otaku" is basically like saying that person is part of a fandom. Of course, some fandoms don't have the word Otaku attached to them, like Kemono (basically the japanese furry fandom). And much like the rest of the world, saying your an anime fan or a my little pony fan or what have you can have some... consequences. Like how "if you're a furry you're automatically into bestiality", or "if you're a brony, you fap to pony porn", or "if you watch anime, you watch tentacle porn all the time". Saying Otaku has a dual meaning in this way, meaning both someone who is a hardcore fan, and someone who has a serious fetish for something. So it's not a term to use lightly, lol. Er... went off on a tangent there. Sorry. So it's very problematic to establish a number for Japanese anime fans since anime there is a continuum: most people watch a little of anime and a few are hardcore fans. In Brazil there are anime fans and there are people who watch anime from time to time and people who watched a ton of anime in their childhood but never watched any afterwards. So it's complicated to classify it. In the US and Europe that the concept of anime fan emerges since 99% of the population there never watches any anime while a few people watch a ton of anime. Exactly, and this is why it's hard to classify anime fans just by sales figures, especially due to the advent of pirating and watching things online. I'd say around 50% or more of people watch their anime online, and not through Crunchy Roll or any other legitimate sites, either. Most anime fans outside of Japan are in China and Korea and Taiwan also look like places for highest density of anime fans in the population. Comics written in Korea and Taiwan are identical to manga, in fact, many people confuse Korean and Taiwanese comics with manga. Yeah, Manhwa and all that. I know of its existence, but it's not quite relevant, since many people prefer manga over anime for some reason, though I personally like both. Guaporense said: Ricequake said: Okay, this just in from Facebook. Here are the numbers of people who show interest in the following "Interests" according to Facebook. Anime Fan - 2,303,134 Anime and Manga Fandom - 4,350,109 Cosplay - 20,407,210 Otaku - 30,053,318 Manga - 69,232,700 Anime Movies - 103,668,600 That last number. Holy freaking crap. O.o Note: there are only 500 million people on Facebook. People who like "anime movies" are apparently 20% of that. O.o Facebook is growing fast though. There are 1 billion Facebook accounts by the end of 2012 (http://www.internetworldstats.com/facebook.htm). Now it's probably a bit more. Still I wonder where those numbers came from because I rarely see anime/manga in the lists of movies or TV from the people I know (mostly Brazilians and Americans). Wow, already? A billion? Does this include multiple accounts and dead accounts? Or not??? Anyways, it's from Facebook's ad manager app, in which you can pick a target audience/interest. The interests I picked are the ones I showed here, along with the numbers Facebook gave. paraboxes said: Like a lot of people, I dont really go around openly telling everyone how much I love anime, and I rarely buy anime related stuff, so it's safe to say that there are plenty of "fans" around the world that aren't represented in sales figures, polls, whatever facebook stats, or such. And this is why the number might be a serious under-estimation. There are a ridiculous number of unknown fans in just about every fandom. Whether they don't know that the fandom exists, or they don't have the money, or whatever, it's hard to count based on salesfigures or representation online. In fact, if every human on the planet were polled (assuming they all told the truth), I bet the numbers for every fandom would skyrocket, becoming 1% or more of the population each. But that's just my own little theory. |
 Seals swim in salt water because pepper water makes them sneeze. |
| Just a random thought: I was surprised to see that Death Note has more "members" on MAL than Avatar on IMDb. |
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