Japan's Weekly Anime TV Rankings

ailailou said:
Huh. Lol for the first 3 places. T_T

stingertomlam said:
One Piece beat Naruto?? Holy crap.

ukonkivi said:
Crayon Shin-chan is massively overrated.:x

Turbe said:

Yea.... I wonder how they actually count who watches what.

ailailou said:
Huh. Lol for the first 10places. T_T

Iri said:
Now that's an interesting question.

Essentially, there's one company in Japan that measures TV ratings -- Video Research. Nielsen, the company responsible for the most famous US ratings, used to have a presence in Japan, but backed out in the mid-90s leaving VR all to itself.

VR has a system called "People Meters" (they're not unique -- most other audience measurement companies use them) which is basically a device hooked to a TV which logs everything watched. The key is that everyone watching has to "log in" (usually by pushing an individualized button). This allows VR to drill into the demographics of viewers. In the old days they used to have one box for the entire household and you never knew who was watching what. They relied on handwritten logs for that. But now the advertisers can know precisely which demographics they're appealing to.

But to get back to the point, they use these boxes and then extrapolate from percentages how much of Japan is watching.

Now, here's the kicker. The numbers in this thread and usually posted are based on the Tokyo area boxes in service. Bear in mind that the metro area around Tokyo has roughly 30 million people, so how many boxes do you think Video Research has out there measuring?

600.

That's right. When you see an anime go up or down a point in the ratings, you're essentially talking about 6 or so households in all of Tokyo that were unable to watch the show that week.

There are two other sets of 600 boxes in Osaka and Nagoya. They also run smaller, long-term ratings studies in multiple other locations, although you never see these ratings since they come out months after the fact. This is really in line with US and other practice though, as there are only 5,000 similar boxes run by Nielsen in the entire USA. That's one of the reasons I'm somewhat skeptical of the reported ratings and value the DVD sales numbers much more, since they are somewhat more representative of what "typical" MAL-people watch (i.e., not most of what's in the Ratings Top 10.)