Highlights for
Ru's 4th Semi-Annual Rec.arts.anime.*
"What are we like?" Fan Survey
April 1999

I'm a day late with this results posting. Sorry about that. Work seems to rear its ugly head at the most inopportune times. Anyways, the questionnaire closed midnight my time on Wednesday, and we came in with the fewest counts this questionnaire has gotten: 117, compared to 127 for summer 1997, 146 for winter 1998, 151 for summer 1998. I can't help but wonder if fear of spam is the cause of the lower turnout. It is also possible that the readership of rec.arts.anime is down. It looks like the number of newbies in the 1-2 year category is down 10% from a year ago.

Some other interesting results, followed by the full set of statistics:

• 50% of the readers of rec.arts.anime.* don't want to read spoilers and 20% are undecided, leaving 30% who like to read spoilers. With that situation, it is no surprise that 95% want to have spoiler alerts of some sort. 75% of us would like to at least see a spoiler tag on the subject line. So please give us a warning if you feel like discussing some detail of a show.
• there is a large majority in the number of folks that at least sometimes decide to buy an anime series based on if they can buy the whole series in a given format. Commercial distributers should take note of this.
• the number of folks who mostly watch translated anime tracks with the seasons. Makes sense. In the winter, there are probably more student types logged on who haven't yet had the chance to pick up a new language. I'd need to run the correlations through my software to get a little more info on this.
• the number of folks who prefer to own subtitled version of anime has pretty well kept climbing in the past 2 years, starting at 27% for summer 1997 and being 45% now.
• DVD version ownership has doubled from about 15% in the summer of 1998, and compared to nearly non-existent a year ago. The other versions are unchanged. This probably is tracking with the number of titles available. This is apparent because the number of folks who would prefer to collect in DVD has not changed that much in the last 6 months. This is bound to change as the affordability improves, because those that wish to collect in DVD format versus LD went from nearly neck and neck to nearly double. The same is true for those that don't own any anime but wish they could. Additionally, with a doubling of DVD deck owners, now the same as LD deck owners, DVD seems to be heading towards increasing its market size. As was the case 6 months ago, it will be interesting to see how things look in the next 6 months to a year.
• recordability of DVDs seems to still be at the back of folks minds.
• computer and office anime related products seem to have dropped some this time around. Has that kind of product suffered a loss of interest by consumers or producers?
• mail order of anime related products from non-local NON-ANIME stores is up 10%. I would have expected anime mail-order stores to get the higher volume. What kind of non-anime stores are we talking about here?
• the number of video stores that carry anime and their stocks may be creeping upwards (there was a 10% jump in the "more than 50" units category from last summer).
• the fraction of readers of rec.arts.anime.misc that read the other groups is about 30% each which is healthy. However, .games and .models have dropped to about 10% in the past year.

Enough gab... So here are the results from my fourth semi-annual questionaire 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