Highlights for
Ru's 5th Semi-Annual Rec.arts.anime.*
"What are we like?" Fan Survey
August 1999

I'm rushing this out because something has come up, so it is quite possible that oddities will show up. This also means I won't be able to post for a short while, so I apologize in advance for not responding to any queries and comments right away. Thanks to all who participated. I hope you will participate in the winter/spring questionnaire.

This questionnaire closed midnight my time on Friday, and it came in with yet again the lowest response, 97. The 4th questionnaire, taken spring 1999 had the previous low of 117. The highest returns was in summer 1998 with 151, and when I started doing this survey it got 127.

The highlights (followed by the full set of statistics):

• once again, 50% of the respondants don't like to read spoilers, and again, 95% prefer advanced warning of spoilers. 70% of the respondants would like to see some sort of tag on the subject line.
• 20% of the respondants feel HTML encoded messages are acceptable in the rec.arts.anime.* news groups. 60% did not think they were acceptable. So newer folks, before you make your first posting, check your news posting software's settings for a setting that says something like HTML messages are turned on. And while you are at it you might as well check to see if your e-mail is set up that way. (It can be an issue when you consider that an HTMLized message takes up MORE than twice as much bandwidth as a straight text version. They come in two parts, the straight text and the HTML version, with the HTML version taking up more space because of the extra codes. And then the headers that tell mail software it is an HTML message is added to that.)
• the amount of folks who prefer to own subs is down from 45% to 35%. This breaks a rising trend. Most of the change went to the "no preference" and "mostly dubs".
• DVD ownership has gone up another 10% from 25% a few months ago. The increase was approximately the same in the previous period. There is also no surprise that LDs are down in all but ownership categories, the latter finally being overtaken by DVD on this questionnaire. DVD is also up 10% in the preference category, to 30%, and is now at the 70% mark for a wish medium. Apparently nearly half the anime fans in rec.arts.anime.* own DVD decks (where practically 100% own VHS). If anyone has any doubts about DVD's market viability, they might as well stop doubting when a niche market like anime gets this kind of medium proliferation.
• music CDs dropped 10%, yen fluctuations? Toys are up, and if I were a betting kind of guy, I'd bet it was due to Pokemon. Office products are back up, so the drop noted last time was just a statistical fluctuation.
• the number of non-anime retail outlets used for anime video purchases seems to have had a 20% jump. Mail order is up by 10%.

I gab too much... So here are the results from my fifth 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. See you all soon. (Go to The Results.)

ru