ITT there are angsty giant robots.

[Stark]

It only makes sense if the high-paying minority pays enough to outweigh the broader audience.

[Ford Prefect]

It only makes sense if the high-paying minority pays enough to outweigh the broader audience.

Well, they do in Japan. 5,000 BD/DVD sales per volume is basically success for TV anime. 15,000 is basically absolute shitloads, and a show like K-On! or Angel Beats! selling 40,000 copies for one volume is an outrageous phenomenon. 40,000 volumes will sell for about 100-150,000,000 yen, which is a quarter of the most recent Fullmetal Alchemist's production costs, and Brotherhood was a really big budget, 5 cour series. Unlike manga, anime isn't geared for a wide audience. Generally speaking it's quite niche and television anime is actually very risky, financially speaking. It can cost tens of million of yen just to secure a decent timeslot, for example. So it being costly, and it being so niche, means that anime tends to be marketed towards otaku who are willing to shell out on these things. Of course, marketing to a niche otaku crowd so that they'll buy expensive DVDs has its potential issues. Koji Matsumoto, a producer on the highly notable noitaminA programming block, once made the statement that the industry might face 'death by moe' as a result, and Dai Sato, probably one of the best writers in the industry, has said that anime is currently stifled for creativity. There's some truth to that; not so long ago the majority of stuff on television in any given season were adaptations of some other work (usually light novels), but that been changing over the past couple of seasons.

Anyway this isn't totally relevant as Evangelion 2.22 sold three hundred thousand blu-rays in its first week and is Japan's best selling blu-ray of all time.

[Uraniun235]

40,000 volumes will sell for about 100-150,000,000 yen, which is a quarter of the most recent Fullmetal Alchemist's production costs, and Brotherhood was a really big budget, 5 cour series.

150,000,000 yen is less than $2,000,000 USD, which works out to less than $50 per volume.

Also, what's a volume? Is that like a season or the whole run of the show or a couple of episodes or...?

[Ford Prefect]

The impression that I've gotten is that, generally speaking, one volume is usually two episodes.

[Uraniun235]

Wow, that puts a bit of perspective into it. I remember hearing about absurdly high prices but I'd forgotten they were that extreme.


Is there not as much advertising money flowing into Japanese TV as there is in the US? (I guess alternately, is there anywhere that has as much ad money propping up TV as the US?)

[Ford Prefect]

While it's pretty rare, I have seen volumes with only one episode. This is why marketability is really important, because you need to sell DVDs and Blu-rays ... but at the same time anime isn't generally aggressively marketed outside of its particular niche. Like I mean I've seen lots of photos of buses with cute girls from currently airing shows painted on them, but something like Angel Beats! having a full page ad in Yomiuri Shimbun was very unusual. Yomiuri is a national newspaper with a very wide readership, so basically the last place you'd expect to see a major advertisment for an anime series, especially because it would have been very expensive for basically any series, let alone a 1 cour show like Angel Beats!. The ad cost about 30-35 million yen which is a lot when 500 million yen is at the high end of budgets. Though, Angel Beats! turned out to be a total phenomenon, so maybe it paid off.

That said I don't really know much about Japanese television stations outside of how it directly relates to anime production. It's certainly very expensive to get a good timeslot, which is probably a part of the reason why anime shows at like two o'clock in the morning. I don't know if this is because sponsorship money isn't great, or if there are other reasons.

[jollyreaper]

The whole death spiral of tightly catering to the paying fans and making the whole genre less accessible to newcomers is pretty common. If moe could be the death of anime, gritty shooters are hurting video games. There are ridiculous success stories like call of duty but most aaa titles are costing tens of millions and struggling to recoup. That means more pressure to rip off a successful formula and cater to the hardcore gamer which makes unexpected runaway hits less likely. No major publisher would have touched the sims without a major name attached to the project.

I don't think the industries will go away but there could be a pretty big slump until someone comes up with the next big idea that gets everyone interested again.

Few observers in the 90's would have thought that there would be a massive spike in female comic readership but that's what happened in the oughts. Of course, the girls were mainly into the shojou manga, not American titles.