Japan Expo Paris award winners; On the different kinds of manga “consumers”…

July 9, 2008 in General Chatter, Manga Minutiae | 13 comments

Patriot… turned in to printer… Comic AG Digital… almost finished… back… hurting… need shower… 

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PWCW’s Kai-Ming Cha and Ed Chavez summarizes the AX show, where they tried their best to get someone to talk on the record about Kodansha, but to no avail.  Cha also blogs about the coming changes for the manga industry that she probably couldn’t include in the PWCW article.

Related: David Welsh makes a good point here about the unrealistic expectations for grown-up manga genres.  It did take 40 years for manga to become an institution in Japan…

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Somewhat related to the above, a few thoughts on the “gloomy” atmosphere surrounding manga at the moment…

This may sound cold-hearted, but all the recent focus on American manga publishers, and attempts to extrapolate their health to the manga medium overall, smacks of unjustified self-importance.  Sure, the US market has become financially important for Japanese publishers, but we’re still just a line item on their quarterly earnings report.  When have we, the US market, ever really driven crucial development of manga itself?  Speaking as a reader, if tomorrow every American manga company disappeared and all of the market were controlled by two Japanese publishers, I would be filled with melancholic nostalgia for those who were here before, but not fear.  Whether I get a manga from an American or Japanese company just wouldn’t make much of a material difference… and why should it?

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The Comics Reporter has a list of winners from the Japan Expo in Paris.  At least the French still give Go Nagai the proper amount of respect.  Also reporting on Japan Expo, the AFP thinks manga is weird.  Mainly because of the cosplayers, it seems.

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Rocket Bomber has a perceptive post on the different kinds of online manga shoppers, but you have to read a bunch of boring stuff on sales ranking methodology before you can get to it.  Yaoi shoppers get their own category?  So unfair.

This actually touches upon something I’ve had on my mind since the flurry of newspaper industry layoffs due to declining ad revenue.  The most simple break-down of manga readers to me are those who do (or potentially would) spend money, and those who don’t (and may never) spend money on our books.  Obviously, it can get a lot more complicated than that; this is just the most rudimentary starting point.  And as a dimunitive publisher with an equally minuscule budget, it behooves us to know who our customers are, and who are not, so our resources are not wasted.  On this, we recently ran two small ad campaigns that were quite illuminating.

We purchased a 1-month banner ad on the (in)famous 4chan community board, and a full page ad in Otaku USA, the print magazine.  Both campaigns cost the same, and were run one after the other.  4chan brought in a respectable number of hits to this website, at a cost of roughly 0.28 cents per click-thru (also good).  Yet we saw no appreciable increase in purchases made through our webstore during the month, despite 4chan being a major hub for purveyors of adult manga.  On the other hand, the ad in Otaku USA has increased our webstore sales by over 100% since the August issue hit stores, despite it being a “general” anime/manga magazine with no adult anime/manga coverage, and there having been no significant increase in web traffic.

I can’t say for sure why the 4chan ads didn’t bring in additional sales; perhaps it’s because of the amount of illicit material available on the board itself and the kind of audience that attracts, or the aversion to print in general of those tech-savvy users, or it could simply be that our ads were poorly designed.  I can’t even say for sure that the 4chan campaign was ineffective… if it raised awareness enough that people would recognize our books when they walk into a comic shop or browse online, then it did its job.  But what I can say for sure is that advertising in Otaku USA worked.  I saw a real, quantifiable effect (and like the above, there were probably lots of unquantifiable benefits too).

Again, it’s impossible for me to weigh the longterm effectiveness of either campaigns within such a short time span, but if I were pressed to name only one difference between the two campaigns that could account for the disparity, it would be the cost of participation for the two readerships.  Obviously, Otaku USA readers spend money on print.  For all the traffic it generates, we can’t make the same determination for the average 4chan goer.  At least in this instance, it turns out that finding a group of generic consumers with money, and a willingness to spend it, is better than targeting a bunch of dedicated online “fans” with unknown buying habits.  Yeah, seems counter-intuitive, doesn’t it…

13 comments

  1. Jeff Flowers on July 10, 2008 at 4:37 am

    I personally don’t care if my manga publisher is Japanese or American, even though I happen to collect all of Icarus’s books, but I do think that an American publisher is better suited for the purpose of selling to Americans.

  3. Dr. Pants on July 10, 2008 at 8:14 am

    Maybe 4chan didn’t bring in additional sales because most of the people on there who would buy Icarus’ materials were already buying them? It seems like Otaku USA reached people who would be interested, but didn’t know about your product. Either way, it seems like the print ads are worth doing more often. More people ought to know about your quality books.

  4. hirohisa4president on July 10, 2008 at 9:11 am

    Didnt you put an ad in playboy also a year ago or so?

  5. Chris on July 10, 2008 at 9:45 am

    Jeff- Yeah, right on buddy! Just like American auto manufacturers!

  6. Simon on July 10, 2008 at 9:49 am

    Dr. Pants–>
    That’s a possibility I considered, but it just doesn’t mesh with the number of additional hits it brought in. I mean, 4chan gave us a solid 2-digit spike for the entirety of the month the ads ran. Advertising in Otaku USA brought no significant increase in hits thus far, but a lot of additional sales. Certainly, the point I was trying to get across is that on a per dollar basis, print advertising may still be a better choice for print pubs. Who knows, if we were a membership/pay site, the situation may very well be reversed.

    Still, it could just come down to our 4chan ads being crap, and perhaps there are less perceivable benefits… I’ll have to consider all that when we start another campaign on that site.  These things really are difficult to judge.

    hirohisa–>
    We semi-regularly run ads in other adult magazines, but not Playboy. Their minimum ad buy is in the 5 figures range. That’s enough for us to put down payments on several new licenses.

  7. anonymous on July 10, 2008 at 10:01 am

    Whenever I see mention of Icarus’s publications on 4chan, I always make sure to post a “Make sure to buy the official blah blah blah release on June etc” sort of thing. Viral marketing, eh.

  8. Simon on July 10, 2008 at 10:01 am

    Jeff Flowers–>
    “but I do think that an American publisher is better suited for the purpose of selling to Americans.”

    I wouldn’t argue with that at all, but issues of translation quality, presentation, advertising, and selling are only relevant within the US market. I just don’t buy the idea Japanese companies taking control of manga publishing in the US (as if it weren’t so in the first place) is going to have any significant impact on manga itself, because US publishers never quite had such influence to begin with. There certainly isn’t enough to proclaim “manga is doomed,” or entertain the idea that the fate of the market is tied to that of Tokyopop, or Dark Horse, or CMX, or Del Rey, etc.

    Again, this is speaking purely from the perspective of a manga reader.  Things will be quite different for retailers and distributors.

  9. Simon on July 10, 2008 at 10:10 am

    Oh shit, it’s Anon! ;)

  10. hirohisa4president on July 10, 2008 at 11:04 am

    I was wondering why doesn’t playboy run an adult manga in their monthly issues like the shueisha weekly playboy does in japan then maybe you’d get some more exposure.

    I’m not sure what shueisha pays playboy for the license of the bunny though?

  12. DocWatson on July 11, 2008 at 4:36 pm

    Simon:

    > We semi-regularly run ads in other adult magazines, but not Playboy.

    How well have those worked for you?

  13. Simon on July 11, 2008 at 5:03 pm

    DocWatson–>
    Honestly, probably not very effective. These magazines are usually filled with ads for penis enlargers, cheap VHS tapes, and 900 numbers. We stick out like a sore something.

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