They brought up Death Note, but not Jigoku Shoujo ("Hell Girl"), presumably because one is vastly more popular and well-known than the other.
Going by Jigoku Shoujo you can actually sell your soul online, though it is a bit closer to a "contact me" form, you only really get to buy "revenge" and only on one person. Definitely a far cry from what you'd expect of modern online commerce.
A genuinely high quality anime takes time and money to make. Otaku fan service can be churned out along with loads of cheap knick knacks. There’s also the whole gacha game industry which ties into those series.
K-pop is similar. People obsess over a band and not only buy an album, they buy an overpriced can of coffee with a picture of their favorite star, a shirt, a bracelet, order a bag of cookies they shilled on their Instagram, and so on.
A school aged boy has to beg his parents to buy him a tshirt with an anime he likes. An adult Fate or Love Live fan has no problem throwing down $500 for a new figure or $80 for a “limited edition” Bangladesh-made bag. They’ll happily do it monthly.
>For example, there is a thriving amateur "doujinshi" community that commonly take copyrighted characters without authorization and make porn manga out of it. There are usually sold at conventions like Comiket and can be found second hand in many of these big stores that all over Akihabara.
It should be kept in mind that doujinshi usually make a loss. It's a hobby and not a business. (Also doujinshi isn't just porn)
Interesting to see the picture on the top of the article, meant to represent Japanese print manga, features Shingeki no Kyojin (Attack on Titan) most prominently.
I don't think I've read any True Beauty, but then again, the fact that I'm not at all sure whether I have, whereas there is no chance of a snowball in hell that I'd confuse Shingeki No Kyojin for anything else, suggests to me that Japanese print manga still have a future. To say the least.
And can I take this opportunity to point people to Totsukuni no Shoujo (The Girl from the Other Side)?
Once in a while, I find a little gem like that buried under all the shonen and shoujo in my local bookstore. That's what keeps me coming back for more.
I can accept a certain amount but then there are series like High School DxD which are nothing but fanservice. The real engine of fan service today are vtubers and mobile games which I think are likely to infect anime because the “minor leagues” of anime and manga art are the fan artists that show up on sites like pixiv and Danbooru and it is pretty rare to see anything people want to draw a lot on Danbooru that is really an anime.
Nintendo or Japanese companies generally don’t do that. There is a huge market (doujinshi) of selling fan-made manga for decades and it is generally seen as a tradition.
I don't think there's an outstandingly popular one. Multiposting to get as many audiences as possible is norm these days. Sites like DMM, Fantia or Skeb are strong, but I don't think any of them get the particular traction.
Besides, LINE is extremely unpopular among otaku in Japan (yes, racism).
The whole entertainment sector in Japan that caters to nerds aka otakus is very much not enticing to normal people. It's very seedy, and run by crime syndicates.
Let's be honest, weeaboos make a poor target market to base any business on. No real purchasing power other than the allowance they get from their parents or perhaps a burger flipping wage, and I'd imagine most of them just pirate their cartoons.
The only two examples you listed are primarily gacha games though. If you meant to draw parallels between K-pop and gacha, why mention anime when they're never the primary medium? And even then, the real money still isn't in the goods, it's in getting people to waste their life's savings gambling for JPEGs.
Doujinshi is a hobby, but that doesn't make it legal, and some companies will go after hobbyists. I may be wrong but I don't expect Disney to allow porn of their characters being sold on the open market.
And BTW, while most doujinshi circles are running at a loss. Second hand shops are for-profit businesses, so there is definitely a commercial element.
As for doujinshi and porn. Last time I went to Comiket, which was quite a while ago, I'd say it was 50/50. And when I say "porn" what I mean is that it contains explicit drawings. Doujinshi is uncommon in the way that there is porn inside but it is not always the main point. In fact many mainstream anime originate from 18+ doujin visual novels with the porn stripped off. Type-moon is particularly well known for that.
On the other hand, it has often seemed like anime has been one of the few professional entertainment industries devoted to trying to make money off the Long Tail.
Also note that the same thing (erotica in mobile game form + loot boxes) but primarily catered to men are an established, and already quite crowded market in Japan.
Hm, it would be a hard guess but in my opinion, readers of Shounen likely read the manga online on some reader or website (at least comparatively more than Shoujo fans). As mentioned in the earlier post, One Piece is absolutely relevant, being the last one of the Big Three still ongoing. SnK is ok, as are other Shounen. Sword Art Online is weirdly popular, although it's hard to classify that as Shounen/Shoujo, it attracts a rather large female audience for some reason.
I wouldn't necessarily give an Amazon list too much weight. Bookstores here in Germany are everywhere and people like to buy there, especially because you can take a quick look into the manga you are buying. So the lists from publishers tend to be worth more. The good part about the Amazon bestseller list is that it includes Carlsen manga where I couldn't find any info from the publisher regarding sales.
That's the problem! The reality is that most anime doesn't make money. The anime that does make money are the shows that do well on television and can support merchandise. So for example Bakugan Battle Brawlers is a terrible show, but it sells toys and makes money. And sadly a show like Lucky Star which is quite good can't even get on TV and won't move merchandise so it dies... : (
Haven't really thought about it in depth, but it's been pretty interesting to see this play out in the American online scans scene as well. From my perspective, Japanese manga was basically the 800 lb gorilla that we were all consuming. At some point in my college days, I think around 2014, this one webcomic called The Gamer came out and was pretty popular. That's the first big Korean webtoon that I recall blowing up in popularity in the online webcomics scene. Actually, I take it back. Tower of God was another popular one as well. I can't remember when that one came out, but I mentally omitted it because I fell off the wagon myself - thought the series moved too slow throughout each season. After those two was Solo Leveling, which really blew up. The premise for SL was pretty generic power fantasy but good enough to entertain on a weekly basis. What really sold it though was the art. Nowadays, if you're reading online scans, you just as likely to run into a Korean webcomic than a Japanese one. (I'm ignoring stuff like the Breaker because I'm pretty sure that started as a print series - the webtoon stuff is a new wave of comics designed specifically for its vertical format)
Recommendations: As someone mentioned earlier -
Peerless Dad
Administrator Kang Jin Lee (Same author as above - spin off
series about one of the characters in the above comic)
Legend of the Northern Blade
Chronicles of the Heavenly Demon
Skeleton Soldier Couldn't Protect the Dungeon (I like it, but admit it's inconsistent. Also, author really likes to emphasize sexual violence against women early on - it's pretty grotty.)
Villain Unrivaled
Return of the Crazy Demon
Probably a lot of other series I like, but these are the ones from the top of my head that are generally pretty good.
Anime is weird and honestly got less horny when comparing to the 80's. Even the hentai market in particular has been shriveling for a while; the days of full adaptations of eroge like Bible black are long over. But it can still be comparatively more sexual compared to most other medium, especially western medium.
Manga has always been a steady stream, and never really stopped. Maybe the largest publishers have toned it down, but the manga market has always been a wide medium with dozens of different publishers. And The doujin market has only grew over the decades.
Anime is an extremely lucrative market, and Westerners spend an absurd amount of money on it, with Hollywood missing out. It's not because it's Japanese, or its weirder quirks, it's just because Japan is making it and Hollywood isn't, because Hollywood is institutionally incapable of believing people want (a) weird fantasy (b) that takes itself seriously (c) in quantity over quality, or even that adult media can be animated in the first place.
I really don't think it's that hard to imagine the same is true of manga vs books. The manga section at any serious bookstore is the size of 3-4 other sections put together, and it isn't for no reason. Even if you assume it's a graphic-novel-specific preference, for every one Western hit like Bone, there's fifty more equally massive hits out of Japan, because they simply try more often. Authors making weird stuff in the West are unable to enter traditional publishing (with the industry learning the exact wrong thing from the YA phenomenon) and frequently settle for a web serial + Patreon model, whereas if they were in Japan there's a well established light novel to manga to anime to movie pipeline.
Going by Jigoku Shoujo you can actually sell your soul online, though it is a bit closer to a "contact me" form, you only really get to buy "revenge" and only on one person. Definitely a far cry from what you'd expect of modern online commerce.
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