Young Magazine the 3rd Ends Use of Reader Questionnaires

Definition of Outdated:
- no longer useful or acceptable : not modern or current

. Everybody still uses the system right now!
. Weekly Shonen Jump is still the biggest magazine, with a huge number of new successful series, to the point of getting an entire successful renewal of the magazine. Everything in huge part because of the system.

This makes a lot of sense really. The vote system that Shonen Jump seems to like so much is pretty outdated right now tbh.

No, you didn't. You shown a page with bad translation and without context about what it was being said. I only didn't answered because I really didn't want to go pick Bakuman again and search for that info, but now I will do it.

In chapter 16 is where Hattori explains all the process of voting, here the specific page:


What we have?

Early Results -> First 100 surveys to arrive!
Final Result -> Random 1,000 surveys, from all the surveys they receive.
3rd Result -> Not specified, just explained that the Editor staff does 1 more.

Note how 1,000 surveys isn't the number of surveys that they receive, 1,000 surveys is the ones that they account! Also with those 1,000 surveys they get the average age of people who voted, manga rankings according with age groups, and according with male-female ration.
The number of people that send shonen Jump surveys is unknown! The only thing we know from Bakuman is that is easily higher than 1,000.
´
Now it comes the question of why they only account 1k, why pick randomly, and why they believe it gives detailed info about gender, age and votes in general? The answer is statistical inference!
What it is? To put simple is the same as what people do every day when tasting food, just a lot more precise and educated. What I'm talking, when saying "tasting food"? Think about this problem: You're doing soup in a huge pot, for a lot of people. You place the ingredients and the preparation, and the end you end up with the soup. But did you placed the right amount of salt? Of spices? Of meat? Of other things? How do you see if the entire soup is well made, or if there is a problem that needs to be corrected? The simple answer is, stir the entire soup, and finally take little spoon with a sample and taste to see how it is. Notice, that it doesn't matter the size of the pot and how much soup it has, the little sample is enough to tell you how the entire soup his! Why? Because the entire soup conforms, within a little error margin(little nuances), to a general result. Giving the sample is randomly chosen(the stir), there is no bias that could just choose the nuances. And so you get a pretty good picture with great resolution, of the subject matter: the soup.

Nobody disagreed about ranking and buying volumes only being weakly related. What was disagreed was that is the norm that there are more people buying a given series in general/average than voting in the magazine.

Again, this ranking only matter in the beginning, never is brought up with a reasonable argument.
For all we know Beelzebub decline was just like 20k-30k(from around 190k to 160k, before disappearing of the oricon ranking), and it survived with it for 11 volumes -> 2 years.

Bakuman talked nothing about the ranking being only relevant in the beginning. In fact the series goes all the way to show the rankings, and present that info as important, for the entirety of the manga. The thing that Bakuman told, and is in chapter 16 as well, and is misinterpreted, is that mangaka with series running for some time, aren't interested in knowing their series rankings, just want to be informed when they are in 1st place. Note, is the MANGAKA, that aren't interested in knowing frequently and being constantly influenced, by the ranking. The ranking still is there and the editors can still inform them about how their series is doing, that ranking is still accounted in the meetings.
Now, have the veteran series in the magazine more leeway than the newbies? Yep, they have. Just like in any company, an employer that already provided much to the company will have an harder time to be fired than a newbie that just entered. But that doesn't mean that the veteran performance now is irrelevant.



I am also of the same opinion that hearing the opinion of fans in twitter is not that good of idea. But I don't agree about calling the audience dumb!

I think they will be dong this, because opposite with more popular magazines, this really small ones have a big difference between buyers of some series and the rankings.
The word of mouth in this case is highly more relevant, where you can end up with a series selling more than 10 times the magazine. For example, Attack on Titan, Black Lagoon, Dorohedoro, ...
So it makes sense that they should go less by votes in the magazine, and more by other mean that takes in consideration how the series is perceived outside of the magazine.

I did not say whether I do or do not belong to the dumb audience group (I believe I generally do), so what I like or dislike has little to do with what I said.

I may be wrong, but I do not expect actually listening to what the fans think in 140 or less characters (which I expect will not generally amount to much more than 'I hated when something bad happened to my favorite character' and forced romantic pairings) and possibly letting it influence the creators is a good thing for the quality of their works.

Makes sense based on the reasoning for the change.

I wonder if other magazines will follow a similar suit in the future.

Yes because 200-1k voters are bigger than 20k+ buyers. I already proved to you through an official source that the Jump ranking don't have high voters counter. That's because from the 2m+ reader the magazine gets only a fraction of those are dedicated enough to bother with sending mail to vote for their top 3 each week.

The discrepancy I talked about is shown with manga like the sumo one, Bleach, Hunter x Hunter, Black Clover, etc.

Sumo one has much better placement overall than Black clover, yet it's volumes sales are considerably lower that the rest of the published manga in the magazine.

Hunter x Hunter could be argued that it always last or bottom because of the editorial department choice, but there must be a lack of votes as well. Yet it sells 900k-1m per volume.

Bleach have been in bottom rankings for at least 2 year, yet it still sells 400k+ per volume in a year. Ironically, Bleach biggest manga sales happened after the era of the ''big 3'' when it was in the top 3 ranking in Jump. Just to show there is barely any correlation between the two things.

And there is probably more examples if I research more.

Reality of the situation is the votes are only relevant for upcoming serialized manga, in order to judge their reception and such. After the manga lasted a while in the magazine and has good volume sales, the results of the rankings for it are irrelevant. When there is a decline in both ranking and volume sales series get axed like beelzebub. And everything has exception but that's generally how it goes as literally presented in Bakuman.

In reality it isn't! This is a 3rd level supplementary magazine. Last known public data was 30k copies per issue.
Making it around the 3 worst magazines print wise.

Like such an insignificant magazine(compared with the big names) will have any influence.
And do you really believe that seeing popularity in Twitter? Of all things, is better than a formal manner. Next thing we know they going to a site like MAL do decide who mangaka gets fired or the one that stays.




The ones that vote are bigger than most of the ones that buy volumes!

And is used statistic inference about the ones that vote!



For somebody that seems to love Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, this seems an even dumber affirmation.

That's pretty big. I wonder if more magazine will follow that. Doubt Jump would.

And he is right. There are many series that flunk in those magazine ranks but sell great in volumes and vice versa. This is probably due to the big difference in the size between those who vote (very small) and those who buy volumes (very big).

The only thing dumber than asking a dumb audience to vote is asking that audience for their opinion.

Very interesting tbh.

I know of those Dengeki G's used those for decades, Love Live, Sister Princess, and Baby Princess, basically anything that Kimino even remotely touches has them.

"Mitsuhiro Muramatsu, deputy editor-in-chief of the magazine, said the decision to end questionnaires was made because sales of compiled manga volumes no longer match the questionnaire results."

That's why anime is important, a high ranking series that sells lower than expected will blossom with an anime and vice versa for low ranking/high sales.

"and Kouji Kumeta's comedy series Nankuru Neesan"

Ooooooh excuse me whaaaat?

didn't even know this magazine existed