Reader's Poll Re: tracking of online sales
Long-time readers know I’m a fair hand with a spreadsheet, and occasionally I’ve turned my attention and my math toward the problem of tracking online sales of manga.
Those of you who are not as familiar with the exercise should click on the ‘rankings’ category in the sidebar, or on this link:
http://www.rocketbomber.com/category/rankings/
(I’m not going to bother setting up an actually poll using an online widget; consider this an invitation for commentary instead.)
I’ll be doing a reboot soon of the manga charts, streamlining the process even further, and seriously cutting back on the number of sources I use. In fact, I’ll end up with only 3 sources [Amazon, B&N, and Borders — please hang on, Borders.] while dropping all others. Here’s the case:
- Books-a-Million updates so infrequently that it’s more like looking at a monthly snapshot, instead of daily (or even weekly) takes on the market – also, pre-orders typically dominate their top 50 Manga to such an extent I have to wonder about either their actual online sales, or their reporting algorithms.
- Buy.com is fine, but since their last redesign, it is only possible to pull up the top 200 ‘bestsellers’, and Manga is not a separate category (instead folded into Graphic Novels, which limits the data).
- DeepDiscount.com is an odd mix of old backlist and preorders, such that I can only assume their customers are only buying items on sale, and that the sales volume of Manga is so low that a single collector purchasing back-fill volumes (or bargain hunting) can have an effect, even to the extent of placing volumes in their top 10.
- Hastings has great promise. But: Their website is the equivalent of a 1997 e-retailer, their database [for books] needs a lot of work, and their customer base needs to buy some manga besides Bleach. Hastings also needs a good way to differentiate between new book sales and used in their online rankings.
- Overstock.com needs a separate manga category. Picking the manga out of their overall GN sales means sifting through a thousand or so titles, just to get a top 100.
- and Powell’s: Love Powell’s. Considering moving to Portland just to shop at Powell’s. That said: once again, it would be nice to shop their website and have it automatically sort new from used, to display the bestsellers in a category and not just the most ‘relevant’ search results (whatever that means) and I’d *really, really* like to include them in a reformulated chart, but their website just makes that too difficult.
I love having more data, and more sources. If all I wanted was the ‘majority’, ‘consensus’ opinion, I could just post a link to an Amazon bestseller chart, call it a day, and go watch some anime while drinking beer. That would be easier, but Amazon is not the be-all-and-end-all of bookselling, even online.
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I’m moving to a new chart, where the online manga sales charts are built using only the available data from the big 3: Amazon, B&N, and Borders. I’m doing this to save time, primarily, as the physical collection of data and entry into a spreadsheet is single largest timesink involved in the process. [cutting the other sites from the calculation is only a 25% or so savings, but that still adds up to hours weekly]
I’ll miss the ‘flavour’ of the smaller sites, and the insight they provide into the Long Tail and darker corners of manga sales, but I plan to offset this at least in part by digging even deeper into remaining sources. [yes, this is also time-consuming but not nearly to the same degree or extent – the bigger sites are set up so well, and their databases are so complete, that adding another 100 manga to the data collection is a matter of minutes — well, tens of minutes anyway – but not hours]
And in early July I’ll do a really deep dig into the manga categories of these 3 sites; we’ll see where the sidewalk ends. I think I might be able to expand & extend the manga database to 15,000 titles, easy.
[…well, not easy in at least one sense, but the books are out there waiting to be rediscovered]
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I’d like to invite your comments –
If I posted a ‘manga online bestseller chart’ that only derived from Amazon, B&N, & Borders: is that still worthwhile? Would you consider it ‘authoritative’? Assuming I can keep up with the exercise, would you like to see something along these lines to once again post weekly?
Would anyone like to see an ‘anime DVD online bestseller chart’? It would just be US sales of DVDs, online only, and drawing only from those websites that already have good data – in the case of Anime DVDs: Amazon, B&N, Best Buy, Hastings, and a player to be named later [likely Buy.com or Overstock.com, or both, depending on how I can manipulate the search]. There is currently no way to track online streaming, so a large chunk of how many of us now consume anime can’t be a part of this ‘bestseller’ chart.
Let me also add: anime DVD tracking would be on a smaller scale. A top 100, at most, not the 500 titles weekly I track for manga; just enough for a top 10 and some other side-reporting besides.
That said: tracking anime DVD still seems like something worth doing.
Considering how small my audience is on this, I probably could have asked each of you on Twitter — but it’s a question [with the explanations and excuses] that
is well over the 140 limit. ;)
Drop comments below or send me an email. Thanks [in advance] everyone; I appreciate the feedback.
