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Originally Posted by DonQuigleone
From how I see the numbers, the Anime studios have a neat operation going but it's only monetizing at most 1%-10% of their viewership. It would seem to me that even without foreign revenue they can earn enough off their core base. But if they found a means to get even a small amount of cash off those who don't buy masses of DVDs, they could be on to a winner, and branch out and do more risky projects.
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That's the million dollar question, I think... last I heard broadcast revenues for the timeslots that don't rely on DVD sales have been dropping over the past few years, which makes it tough for studios that want to try and go that route.
IIRC a lot of the big selling late night shows like Bakemonogatari and K-On! typically average about 2%, so about 960,000 households by Seiji's numbers. So 5% buy rate for Bakemonogatari and about half that for K-On based on regular viewership. Whether that's accurate is another matter... I seem to remember that K-On! achieved about twice its normal rating when one channel did a four anime episode special block one week that aired it back to back with that week's Angel Beats.
That said... I'm not sure this kind of buy rate is actually unusually low for a TV series. For example, I get the impression that the 2004 version of Battlestar Galactica's season by season DVD boxes typically sold around 250K in the US during their first few weeks on the market... with a viewership that reached 2.3 million in 2004. And that series has a hardcore geek following that would typically lead to high DVD sales, plus much better pricing than R2 anime.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DonQuigleone
Given this, I wonder why no one has managed to duplicate such a model outside Japan, and to other viewers. It's a pretty amazing thing to be able to make 8 hours of animation and be able to pay for it out of only 20,000 or so people actually paying for it. Compare that to a movie, where they need millions of ticket sales to fund 2 hours of footage, which is easier to make then Animation! (excluding blockbusters)
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The entire mentality is difference... I'm pretty sure a lot of anime DVDs aren't driven so much by a need to own the show (they can just record the broadcast or rent), but because such expensive sets end up being an otaku status symbol. And I can't imagine western anime fans seeing such releases as status symbols rather than ripoffs.
(Note: western home video prices used to be similar to R2 anime DVD prices... that's why rentals were popular. I suspect that Japan is a rental heavy market, since it doesn't sound like non-anime DVD/Bluray sells that well there either, despite being somewhat more reasonable in price (albeit still quite a bit more than US prices).)
(Note 2: The closest thing we have in North America to typical R2 anime releases is probably some of those insane limited edition sets I occasionally read about while flipping through Sound and Vision magazines at my local library... ie. a $500 set of soundtrack CDs for Burton/Elfman movies that is housed in a box that contains a working zootrope, made in a 1000 unit run. But that's a product targeted to an established fanbase.)