Highlights for
Ru's 5th Annual Rec.arts.anime.*
"What are we like?" Fan Survey
August 2001

The 5th annual "What are we like?" survey closed late Wednesday night, with 71 returns. This follows the downward trend from the past few surveys.

Anyways, here are some highlights (which will be followed by the full set of compiled results below) in comparison to last year's results, or are new information:

• there's been a slight shift towards less anime video watching time. It isn't old age (ok, maturity of this crowd) because there is also a slight shift to a newer fandom. Also, the non-anime watching time hasn't shifted significantly. The actual age group hasn't changed either.
• it looks like fewer folks are reading fan magazines or are reading fewer. Is that because there are fewer available? Unfortunately, this is the first year I asked about number of online news sites, so I can't tell if that's where folks are going.
• slightly fewer folks here read manga
• fewer seem to go to cons or attend fewer. That may have someting to do with the slight shift in age group.
• there are a few of us here that don't know what "cosplay" is. For those of you, it's basically dressing in anime character costume for show (posing for cameras, walking runways, costume events). It's kind of wierd when you think about the fact that the characters are just brush and paint, but there are some darn good ones out there nonetheless.
• we're still a subtitle-prefering crowd
• half of us consider the audio part of a video or film equal in importance to the visual. Not surprising for a sub-prefering crowd.
• finally, I can lay some of my DVD questions to rest or update them. This year we broke the 80% DVD media ownership mark. It was up 20% from last year, which is exactly on track from previous surveys. That rate should start to flatten out now, as the "wish" level is about 85% (which is up less than 10%). I estimate the ownership level to be about 90% next year.
• the tape market has nosedived accordingly.
• as a group, we are buying slightly more than we used to. Given the slightly reduced viewing time, either we are starting to build up a backlog, or we aren't repeating old stuff as often :)
• here's a few for the companies (pretty much the same as last year):
  • we don't want the credits cut,
  • we don't want the eyecatches cut,
  • we prefer most of the previews after the main feature,
  • we prefer 3 or more previews (after the main feature)
  • we like actor interviews as bonuses
  • most want to see the Japanese cast (with a sub crowd this is obvious)
  • we want to see creditless versions of opening or ending sequences as bonuses
  • we want to see picture and sketch galleries as bonuses.
• most of us watch fansubs, though for the majority less than 20% of anime we watch are fansubs
• (non)recordability of DVDs is no longer an issue. Obvious.
• anime DVD rentals haven't quite made the scene yet. Retailing is a bit better but there's quite a way to go yet.
• in general, the disappearance of VHS has little to do with adoption of DVD by the industry
• a little less than 2/3 of us avoid pirated or bootleg anime-related products. About a quarter sometimes does. For those who didn't know about these things, check the FAQs that get posted near the beginning of the month (for CDs, check my r.a.a.music FAQ).
• there's a similar situation regarding the selling of bootlegs at cons (many cons do allow it, including the huge Anime Expo).
• not many of us belong to an anime club this year, and the ones we do belong to are generall smaller.
• folks are reading the rec.arts.anime news groups less frequently but they post more as a group. The lurkers are way down (in response - maybe they aren't even doing the survey anymore). Maybe it's because we spend 2 or more hours per day web browsing :)
• even more folks don't like reading spoilers and more are undecided. So please watch for spoilers in your postings, and please use some sort of warning. Most prefered warnings are a tag on the Subject line (e.g. [SPOILERS]) and putting in lots of blank lines before the spoiler. A little less than half of use wouldn't mind the use of ROT13 encoding of spoilers, but a quarter of us don't even know what that is, so be prepared for the questions or flames for a while if you try it. Some news readers do this decryption (which is basically shifting each letter by letters), not sure about encryption.
• HTML encoded postings are even less acceptable than ever here
• 2/3 of us still don't want to see FA/FS/FT postings in all but r.a.a.marketplace. Those of you wanting to sell stuff, be aware of that and be prepared for complaints. And please, if you have more than one item, put them all in one posting.
• more of us are paying for internet accounts, but still manage to have free web space.
• and the thing that doesn't sound right (unless, we are generally dying off as fans :) ) is that 50% of us have participated in this survey before. Ok, chances are that half the folks simply don't want to bother with this survey more than once.

Hmf. That was long. Ok, here are the actual compiled results... For each question, I've tabulated the raw count and the percentage of total returns for each of the possible responses. I've added a "blank" entry to round out the totals. Some questions had multiple responses, so don't expect all tallies to come to 100%.

Enjoy. (Go to The Results.)

ru