2008 Charts: Naruto
…oh sure, you know I post long lists of text-formatted charts, but you might have asked yourself, What’s The Point? “Oooo, Naruto’s number one again, I could have told you that, Matt.”
Occasionally I’ve also posted pie charts. They’re easy, too. [dr.horrible] “Like Pie.” [/dr.horrible]
Can I attempt a deeper analysis, with maybe some graphic interpretation to make the points clear?
Gee, that sounds like work…
…This is a hobby, folks, I’m not sure I want to do work…
(you should be thankful I like math)
2008 & Naruto actually combine to make a very good case study, by virtue of the popularity of the series (which results in large, trackable sales) and also because 2008 was ‘normal’ for Naruto, a pause between the Fall ’07 and Winter ’09 Sales Putschsen.
Releases:
Naruto 28 — Mar 2008
Naruto 29 — May 2008
Naruto 30 — Jul 2008
Naruto 31 — Sep 2008
Naruto 32 — Nov 2008
Naruto 33 — Dec 2008
Naruto vol 28 is the pivot: first volume available after the ‘Naruto Nation’ promo, available all year, and sold both to the folks who were collecting individual volumes and to those who bought the ‘Shadow Box’ box set (vols 1-27) who’d like to continue with the series. It’s the pale blue line that hovers around 6000 in the posted chart above; it’s our baseline for demand.
Underneath that, hovering around 3000 initially, you can see a tight knot of titles early in the year — not just the backlist (vols 1-5 are charted above) but also pre-orders for volume 29. And then we watch each volume break out in turn (dark green, light green, purple, orange, and red lines above) and the overall lifting effect this has on the series — from Feb to Dec the overall scores have risen from a 2500-3500 range to a 4500-5500 range.
In other words, even with more volumes available and presumably with more fans ‘graduating’ from starting out with the early volumes to collecting only the most recent volumes — more and more people are signing on with volume one.
Sure, I said demand was softening. —and I stand by that. Long term this is not a sustainable model —But for the short term, Viz has a license to print money.
as noted in a more recent post, I should have divided values on the y-axis above by 10:
the “scores” as posted in the weekly charts have this built in, the data used above corresponds to the “points” assigned to titles as I pull in data each week from the various source charts.
“points” and “scores” are the same; Like I said, I just divide by ten — but to keep this chart compatible with all the other posted data I really should have made that correction.
Comment by Matt Blind — 30 January 2009, 04:52 #