http://www.oocities.org/ruigarashi/Surveys/fans/fan0611/results.html
Oh, what non-fun this survey was. It started off slow (the Usenet phase), then only a scant couple hours into the Web phase, the very HIGH VOLUME phase, I encounter the Geocities download limit. It worked out that when more than 30 people access the questionnaire within an hour, Geocities closes down the user account's site. So I scrambled to move the questionnaire to an alternate site. Whew.
Then the next morning, at a time when I expect the high volume to continue, the network goes down. Not just the server, but entire neighborhoods go down. I phoned my ISP and the first thing I hear is something along the lines of, "we are experiencing some technical problems with internet access, if you are in this area, this area, this area, or this area, we are working to solve the problem right now. Please hang up now, so that other service calls can go through." or something like that. That lasted a couple of hours.
Not long after that, I discovered my local network was down. No traffic was getting to my workstation, or any workstation. The router had gotten pretty messed up somehow, and I didn't make things any better. At least not for a while. It turns out all I had to do was hold the RESET BUTTON LONG ENOUGH. I probably could have gotten things up and running within 5 minutes if I had used a clock, but no, instead, I struggled a couple hours to get it back.
Those weren't the only serious problems. There was an odd bug in the code that generated the web questionnaire which caused the "skip to" link to wipe out all of the user's input. Tiny looking error, with very frustrating consequences.
All told, there must have been hundreds of people that were pulling their hair out in those first two days after Anime News Network and other folks kindly announced my survey. Putting an hour into something like this and then having it go no where is a slap in the face. Even being denied access to it within the first hours is a slap. To those folks, I apologize. I may not have been directly responsible for all of the problems, but some of my decisions in setting up the survey were not so good.
Oh, well, enough of that.
What follows are the results of the net sum of all responses to my survey that ran from 25 October to 22 November, 2006. This year we had 798 unique returns - darnit, just short of 800. That's WAY up from any previous survey. This time I saw the problem that must have cause the shortfall in 2004 and 2003.
The additional comment boxes worked out well. People were giving me the number and kinds of comments I've come to expect.
Once again, I'd like to thank Anime News Network for posting the announcement for the survey on their forums, and I'd like to thank those fans who posted announcements and pointers on your favourite forums and web pages.
Finally, I'd like to thank all of you who went to the daunting trouble of doing the survey. I continue to be impressed by how masochistic many of us are, as I once again got many comments about how long YET fun it was. :) That isn't to say there weren't some complaints, but hey, I DID provide warnings, even right on the form. Anyhow they were WAY outnumbered by the masochists, err, the folks who enjoyed it. There were a few appreciative comments about how it made folks think a bit more about their being a fan or some aspect of being a fan, and I'm glad this survey can do that. I got some good suggestions (yes, yes, groan all you want, it does mean a longer questionnaire next year... blame Wolverine Princess).
I've been asking the "degree of fandom" question for a couple of years now, and it hasn't changed much. This year I put some machinery together to see how some of these groups differ. I'll be putting some of that up some time. It turns out the difference between "Big fan" and "Moderate fan" isn't significant. Not sure what I'm going to do about that. 90% of the responders have been fans for 3 or more years. That means we are picking up less than 10% every 2 years, and that anime is going to be a niche market for quite some time. More than half of fans were kids when they became fans, 80% if you include high school.
On average, we collectively seem to like about 2/3 of the anime we see, at least enough to watch to the end, and maybe enough to buy 40% of what we watch. And we seem to average about an hour of anime per day, which is slightly higher than non-anime video.
I added the genres questions this year. I've always thought that the SF and fantasy component of anime was one of its main draws, and at 70%, that does seem to be the case. I'm a bit surprised that horror is in the bottom third. The others were no surprise. It was interesting to see that 75% of the responders knew at least some of the Japanese terms in the Japanese categories question. And no, there were very FEW blanket responses. More interesting to me is that categories like yaoi and yuri have 20ish% followings. That's significant.
Another addition were questions about the impact of anime on pastimes. I know my other pastimes took quite a hit when the bug bit me. 70% folks seem to have experienced some effect, but in general, no worse than "somewhat", which is not as bad as me. 75% of the folks also keep anime and other pastimes fairly separate. It's good to see most of you lead better rounded lives than a certain surveyor. This kind of separation seems to carry right across the spectrum of activities, including ones with perceived ties to anime such as reading manga and video games.
On a related subject, about half of us have an anime fan club nearby, but only 25% of us belong to at least one. Most of these are fairly sizable.
As for online activities, we collectively average about an hour a day of web browsing. There's a wide range of purposes, but part of that is in web forums, of which we typically visit two. Amusingly, of the responders willing to answer, most web-based readers though Usenet newsgroups harder to use than the web forums and further analysis shows the Usenet readers think the total opposite. That's often chalked up to newsreader software (or disuse of). Oh, one thing in common: please give advanced warning of spoilers in your discussions. Nearly 90% of responders want to be warned of spoilers in any forum.
A few folks asked if this survey was industry driven. It isn't, and by the time you finished answering the question about singing along to theme songs, that should have been apparent :) I added that a few years back on a lark. It turns out a good number of us are closet idol singers; 75% of us sing at least parts of the songs. What I should ask is if they do it in company.
Another of these goofy questions was whether you thought seeing the real people behind the voices was strange. I wanted to see how much of a disconnect there was between the voice and peoples' expectations of the actor. Very few said "yes" outright, and half said "no". A third sometimes did.
I added the questions about professional involvement because every year I get a few comments from folks about it, and I was starting to feel sorry for leaving the professionals out.
On the sub vs dub question, don't interpret that as representing all fans. Folks who participate in internet discussion forums like Usenet and web forums tend to be more "savvy" fans. When you look at the demographics, like education and technical capacity (basically a crowd that is actively looking to expand its horizons) it's actually not surprising that a majority of THIS segment of fandom prefers subtitled anime over dubbed, 2 to 1 conservatively, or as high as 4 to 1 if you exclude the "no preference" crowd. Remember, this is the crowd that has more than a clue of the Japanese categorizations of anime and manga.
And we need the translations. On average we aren't fluent in understanding spoken Japanese, let alone speaking it or reading it. I ought to add a "writing Japanese" question just to round the set out. 80% of us rely on some translation, 50% totally so. That isn't for trying, though; 40% have taken classes. And yes, anime was responsible for much of those.
On the issue of accessibility, half of us often still buy our anime locally. At the same time, a third of us also buy our anime from non-local sources, which I'm taking that to mean delivered e.g. from something like a net-order company.
The video format question originally tracked the rate of adoption of DVD electronics. I've plotted this at
http://www.oocities.org/ruigarashi/Surveys/fans/trends.html
We're now watching the slow slide of Tape as other media players take over. I just wish I had remembered to put PVR on the list. I was too focused on the current medium of interest, HD-DVD which many folks doubt will take off like DVD did. My way of looking at it is, will it end up being the LD of this generation?
As in past surveys, folks generally don't care what kind of preview they are presented. A quarter like music video style, a quarter like voice-over style, and a quarter will take any. I personally find the voiceover types to be pretty bad, so I'm always puzzled about this uniformity.
If anyone asks you why companies don't release box sets right away, the answer is because they know they can sell the individual units (at a high total cost). In the couple of years that I've asked about whether folks buy individual units or wait for the complete (usually box) release later, it's been pretty even between the two, at 40% a piece. OK, OK, the actual answer is that it takes time to produce the episodes, but my explanation appeals to the conspiracy theorists. :) What this question probably actually suggests is that many of us are rather budget minded. Let's face it, it is a pricey pastime.
I added the box set questions this year wondering if there was a clear preference or a particularly reviled format. The standard open-front cardboard box is the most popular, holding about 45% of those who care about box sets. The other half were sprinkled amongst the rest. As for reviled, there really wasn't one universally reviled form factor. The style that got more responses were the lunchboxes, but that only came from about 20%-25% of responders.
I have to wonder if the average of 3 episodes before deciding not to continue watching is simply a function of how many episode is on a disc, or if that is what the industry discovered and consequently decided to put 4 on a disc. I'm guessing the former.
I added a bunch of questions about paying for downloadable anime because I wanted to see what the anime fans' take was on the subject, in a less anecdotal fashion. A third of us simply aren't interested in downloadable anime. Of the remainder, it's pretty much evenly split between folks that would use downloads-for-pay for their permanent collection versus sampling for hardcopies. Those folks generally want DVD quality video. I was curious to see if folks wanted just the anime, or if collecting goodies was still an attraction, and it's looking again like half do, half don't. Further analysis shows it is independent of the purpose for downloading. I was expecting the collector to want these more. I was fairly impressed by how reasonable folks were about pricing, as more than half of the interested folks suggested 40% or more of the hardcopy price. I was afraid I would see 10-19% pegged (not surprisingly, that's what happened for the equivalent poor quality question). For free anime, folks were fairly reasonable about quality, an even split between willingness to accept VHS quality versus DVD quality.
I started tracking attitudes toward fansubs of commercially available anime a couple years ago. It's too soon to tell if there's a moral slide in play yet. I personally find mind-boggling the notion that a disc can be for sale in front of a person and that person opts for a fansub, and the results suggest 30% of responders seem to think that way. We're not that entitled to getting anime. Further analysis doesn't show any clear pattern that these folks are using these fansubs to-wards purchasing legitimate version, either. Further analysis also shows that the Usenet-based readers in rec.arts.anime.* are collectively stricter about the issue, from 22% for the total survey to 45% in Usenet for those who think those kinds of fansubs are piracy; and the comparison is 45% to 70% if we include the "I think it's wrong, but..." crowd.
This year, the survey got considerably more responders from Africa, West Asia, and South America, more than all previous years combined!
When I ran the survey on Usenet, the survey turnover rate (i.e. the fraction of folks who did it before) was 50%. That's still the case for Usenet readers this time. When I look at web-based readers that turnover has been 80%.
OK, up to now, I've resisted added a question about gender. It's not for lack of trying, but every time I sit down to update the list of questions and start on the "What gender..." I find I simply can't go through with it. It just seems like a crass question that fanboys would want to see, and frankly, I wasn't really interested in the question. But over that last couple of years, the apparently female contingent have been more insistent on the question being asked. How would I know they are female? I don't, but the requests can't all be guys. So next year I will try to work up the nerve to add the gender question.
OK, lastly, it's time for me to stand on the soapbox for what we (internet savvy) fans would like the industry to do (or not do). So to the INDUSTRY FOLKS, here's what we say.
By a wide margin:
Here are the options we prefer (i.e. not as strong results):
And in the "it doesn't really matter, but..." category
I put up an excerpted version of the results tallies on my results page, for industry types to look at
http://www.oocities.org/ruigarashi/Surveys/fans/fan0611/results_industry.html
A copy of these highlights can be found at
http://www.oocities.org/ruigarashi/Surveys/fans/fan0611/highlights.html
The actual tallies can be found at
http://www.oocities.org/ruigarashi/Surveys/fans/fan0611/results.html
The rec.arts.anime tallies can be found at
http://www.oocities.org/ruigarashi/Surveys/fans/fan0611/results_raa.html
and the comparison results for that can be found at
http://www.oocities.org/ruigarashi/Surveys/fans/fan0611/results_raa_vs_w.html
Some trend analyses can be found at
http://www.oocities.org/ruigarashi/Surveys/fans/trends.html
Enjoy. (Go to The Results.)