Highlights for
Ru's 3rd Semi-Annual Rec.arts.anime.*
"What are we like?" Fan Survey
August 1998

Well, the questionaire closed midnight my time on Wednesday, and we barely squeaked past the 150 mark. However, this is remarkable for two reasons. First, this questionaire had the best turn out of the three I've run since last summer. Second, this follows a trend of increasing turn out, despite what one might expect for seasonal demographics changes. Many thanks to all who participated and to those who made suggestions and comments towards the next questionaire (which I hope to run this winter).

I'll be posting the actual results right after this note in rec.arts.anime.misc, rec.arts.anime.fandom, and rec.arts.anime.info.

As I commented earlier, one can't really tell directly from this questionaire if the base fan population is increasing or if folks are managing to remain connected year round. Comparing with the questionaire I ran a year ago, it looks like the number of veterans (fans for 6 or more years) is what brought the count up, so that simply implies more felt like participating this time around or have better connectivity now than a year ago. I have statistics for number of people who have participated in the questionaire before (25%), but with no other questionaire with the same statistics, I'll have to wait for the next questionaire.

Other hightlights from this questionaire:

1. couriously enough, the "know a few words and phrases" categories of the fluency questions saw the majority of increase in counts. I would have expected a uniform distribution of additional counts compared to the questionaire a year ago.
2. The number of folks that watch untranslated anime is up
3. The number of folks that prefer subs (not necessarily exclusively) is up 10%.
4. DVD ownership is up to 14% from 2% last year, while LD ownership has remained more or less unchanged at 30%. There was a question a while ago about the relative market size of anime in LD and DVD formats. In a different questionaire, results indicated that an equal number of folks wished to collect anime in LD and DVD formats, but there was a question of whether this was wishful thinking or actual purchasing strength. The results from the current questionaire reflects that result. Unfortunately, due to bad wording it isn't clear if the gap from the "preference" question indicates that DVD is still behind LD. (I had a hard time trying to come up with the questions, but I'll try again). However, the equipment question does indicate that DVD hasn't caught up with LD yet.
5. What I find personally depressing is that 50% of us get our anime products (eg. CDs, calendars, models) from LOCAL anime stores. You lucky bums. Fortunately, I'm one of the 55% who get stuff by mail order.
6. Fortunately for 60% of us, there are 3 or more video stores accessible that carry anime videos. 80% have access to stores that actually have separate animation or anime sections. 40% of those stores have anime inventories larget than 30.
7. Most of use make good use of information resources to find out what anime to buy, but ultimately seeing for oneself is required.
8. The opposite is nearly true for anime related products, where more often than not, little information is demanded before purchasing.
9. As usual, the majority (70%) of readers of rec.arts.anime.* post less than once a week, and about 15% post once or more per day. The major readership is .misc of course, but I'm still surprised that .info doesn't have nearly 100% readership (it has 45%), since it is an announcement group and has high signal to noise.
10. not many of the total population of known fans actually read news groups.

Go to The Results.