[kj1980]

Originally Posted by Quarkboy

Can you be more specific? What exactly do you think will happen because of the "pop"?

Will the studios consolidate, and focus on producing less, but higher quality shows?
Or will we simply see less new anime, and lower quality shows?

Fair enough:

Currently, there are close to 60-70 animes showing here in Japan right now.

What can be said in term of anime business as a whole is "we have too much supply of anime against the actual demand for it." (Watanabe Takashi, editor-in-chief, Newtype Magazine).

Let me clarify that there are two types of anime, on basis of Video Research (comparable to Nielsen in the States?) Ratings:

To simplify, I'll use Mr. Watanabe's "60 anime shows total in a week" as a reference
A. Only 10%~15% of the anime that is being aired right now actually gets VR-ratings of over 10% ("Doraemon," "Sazae-san," "Chibi-Maruko-chan" "Crayon Shinchan," "Inuyasha," "Detective Conan," "Naruto," "One Piece.") - Video Research
B. The rest 90%~85% of the animes, in general, get VR-ratings as low as 0.1%~5% ratings. - Video Research
Each anime costs around USD$300,000 per episode to make.
A 10%-and-above MR-rating anime can easily get multi-billion dollar corporations like Lotte, Glico, and House Foods as sponsors, and the studios can easily get loans from banks as these animes has already proven themselves that they are "money makers" by the amount of manga that is being sold. Hence, these animes also get the "golden time" slots of 6:00~8:00PM on weekdays on a regular VHF channel

On the other hand, you have the rest of the anime, which have good stories and high qualities as well, will never see the daylight as the animes noted above. Why?

1. Though more and more animes here as well are becoming based on a manga or a novel, compared to the "best-sellers" they are rather dim and dull. If a bank and a corporate sponsor had to choose between funding an anime which is based on a manga that sells more than a million copies ("Inuyasha," "Meitantei Conan") to something that sells barely above the 200,000 mark "Chrno Crusade" "Maria-sama ga Miteru," of course the they are going to chase after something that can rake in more money.

2. Most of these animes are made not toward "the casual viewer," but toward "older anime fans." While animes like "Doraemon" and "Sazae-san" are national icons that are watched by old and young generations alike, it is hard to see something like "Maburaho" becoming an anime that is to be viewed while eating dinner.

Hence, these animes are shoved into obscure timeslots like 1~3AM in the midst of the night, and shown on "minor local" UHF stations or BS/CS satellite channels.

Then who sponsors these animes? I noted myself on a different thread that many of the sponsors who fund these types of animes are anime-related companies (i.e.: Lantis, Bandai, Broccoli, etc). These animes will never get the ratings as "Doraemon" and "Sazae-san," so they are less likely to be funded by multi-national banks and corporations. These animes are made by many different anime companies funding each other. Their profit mainly comes from DVD and goods sales. At USD$300,000 per episode, the anime companies need to do whatever it takes to rake in a profit...hence you have very expensive DVD costs and abundance of goods and items. They are also most likely to sell their licenses to reduce the amount of profit they need to recover. That is how these smaller, anime companies did to survive.

However, as more and more animes get made as more and more minor anime companies jump on this bandwagon in such a style, they are just spiraling themselves as a whole to death.

If there was only a few of these types of anime raking in 5% ratings each, then they would still be profittable and be afloat. But as you have more than 40~50 of these types of "minor animes," they are just cutting into the minority "anime lover" population...which only cuts back that 5% each into smaller and smaller ratings distributed to more anime shows. As these anime shows get harder and harder to profitize, they will end up producing more and more goods and DVDs, licensing them to the States at a higher and higher cost to attract the buyers.

But the demand is limited. The "anime lover" population that these animes are catered to are limited. Even "anime lovers" have their own life to worry about. They cannot watch seven different shows on seven different channels at 1~3AM in the night everyday....they have to go to work and/or school the next day. The point comes to the issue "it's great that there is so much anime, but so little time." Less time means lesser viewers divided upon more and more anime shown at such time. Lesser viewers means, lesser profits, lesser profits means more and more goods and DVDs at a higher price.

The way of these types of animes are going exactly the way of real-estate and finance escalations in the 1980s and early 1990s in Japan. Inflation of prices and monstrous outcroppings of banks and real estate agencies, more and more writs of bad loans, to a point where demand itself disappeared. What happened was a huge financial crash that left Japanese economy in ruins and a decade-and-counting economic recession that Japan has yet to recover from.

It maybe great that we have so much anime to choose from. But with so much anime to watch, it only makes these anime companies harder and harder to profitize....(point taken in strong contrast to this board). Once the point comes where profit is unavailable with a dramatic drop in funds....the bubble is going to "pop."

Frankly, as an anime watcher since the 1980s, this anime abundance is very scary. Back when I was a child, there were only seven channels on VHF (plus some minor ones on UHF) that I can watch. Limited channels means only the anime that were "worth showing on TV" were aired.

Now we have several additional channels on BS satellite, over 500 channels on CS satellite in addition to the VHF and UHF channels. With an abundance of channels, animes "that aren't profitable by regular means" can have their shows aired on an alternate channel.

But as you can see....more only leads to "slowly strangling yourself to death"