AniDB Analysis – Anime Series 2010 Part 1
Posted: March 4, 2011 Filed under: Anime, Anime 2010, Series 8 CommentsIn looking around for other information to analyze anime series and came across AniDB website (thanks to Taka in the previous comment section), which has other unique statistics I have not found anywhere. This includes:
– Anime ratings segmented by males and females
– Anime ratings segmented by age groups
– Individual anime episode rating
– Anime ratings segmented by temporary (ratings posted by people who have not finished a series) and permanent (ratings posted by people who have seen the series) categories
This piqued my interest and after a few (10) hours collecting the data, here are some interesting results based on anime series in 2010 (I am working towards getting data from other year but that is still so far work in progress)
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COMPARISON ANIDB vs. ANN
First off, let us look at the break down and comparison of AniDB and ANN database. I have always held Anime News Network as the benchmark of anime ratings I have done so it is interesting for me to see how AniDB stacks up to ANN. I am limiting the scope to just anime series in 2010
| AniDB | ANN | |
| Number of titles | 69 | 80 |
| Median votes per title | 483 | 202 |
| Mean votes per title | 603 | 277 |
| Max votes | 2159 | 1180 |
| Max votes (series) | Angel Beats! | Angel Beats! |
| Min votes | 37 | 9 |
| Min votes (Series) | Heartcatch Precure! | Tono to Issho |
| Median rating | 7.22 | 7.25 |
| Mean rating | 7.11 | 7.08 |
| Std rating | 0.98 | 0.88 |
– ANN has lower number of votes than AniDB. However, median and mean of numbers of seen are 422 and 539 respectively, which is very close to AniDB number
– Rating statistics is very similar. AniDB has marginally higher standard deviation which means that scores are slightly more extreme
– All in all, the voting pattern and composition of these two sources seem very similar. Any slight difference can potentially be chalked down to small sizes. It is good to see no particular skew or
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MALE & FEMALE
– for the 69 series, the median for male-to-female permanent votes ratio is 92:8. This can be easily interpreted that anime is a male-dominated hobby for the most part
– Segmenting this ratio down further into major demographic, it goes as planned that Shoujo and Josei have the highest percentages of female voters. Saying that, the percentage is still no more than 18% female
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Top 3 Male-dominated anime series
– All moe/fanservice dominated series
– Top ten series in this categories are classified as either moe, fanservice or ecchi, with the exception of Cobra the Animation
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Top 3 Female-dominated anime series
– The top three are unsurprisingly more Shoujo series. You can look at the pictures and get that vibe!
– Betrayal Knows My Name is the only series that has more female voters than males
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Voting comparison
– Males give rating of 7.36 for all anime series in 2010. Females give 7.56. Female is slightly more generous in term of rating but it is not a big margin by all means
Segmentation by demographic:
– Unsurprisingly, Shounen and Seinen has the highest male-to-female ratio
– Shoujo has the lowest. It’s value of 82% is heavily influenced by the fact it is made up of a sample size of 5, one of which has high male percentage and as many votes as the other 4 combined (Kaichou wa maid-sama; 86%; 872 votes). Ignoring this one anime, the other four has male-to-female ratio of 72%
– Interestingly, Seinen and Josei both have slightly higher male percentage than their younger demographic counterpart. Older women watch less anime?
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ANIDB 2010 TOP 10
I cannot finish this edition of post without showing the top 10 anime based on permanent rating on AniDB
– Similar to what happened in ANN votes, Katanagatari ranks first again. This series seems to do much better in a rating environment than polling
– Nodame Cantabile: Finale and Big Windup 2 are also a few more series that do better in rating scenarios (5th and 7th in ANN) versus in ranking scenarios (29th and 36th in my ranking-dominated best-of-2010 list). I can’t use the logic that they are more obscure so often miss out in the ranking though since Nodame Cantabile: Finale‘s number of votes come in the top 10 of my sample size.
– Hidamari SketchxH, Rainbow and Heartcure Precure! make it in the list on the strength of potentially a very small sample sizes (327, 206 and 37 respectively). If we remove these three, the next three up are Shiki, Kaichou wa Maid-sama and K-ON!!
– Bottom 5 worst rated anime series are Seikon no Qwaser, Blessing of the Campanella, Ookami-kakushi, Iron Man and Chu-Bra!! in that order. It takes too much effort to put nice pictures for them so name calling like this will do.
– Seikon no Qwaser also has the dubious distinction of being the worst rated anime series from both ANN and AniDB. The online voting communities seem to know what their favourite and least favourite series are!
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CONCLUSION
I can rather conclusively say that online anime rating is a very male-dominated world. Extrapolating this out a little bit, I can perhaps make quantitative case for suggesting anime watching is also of the same nature. I also love to see how well anime stereotypes track with actual data (moe anime is watched by male; pretty boys type attract girls). Not too difficult to predict but at least the numbers hold true:) It is interesting also to see how certain animes do better in rating vs. ranking and how consistent the rating is between AniDB and ANN. I definitely need to work on collecting more data for even more in-depth analysis!
Enough for now. I will dig deeper into age group and episode analysis in the next edition.
PS. I have included 83 series. Only 71 has information in AniDB database (Those without information are typically series which are still running, hence there is no way anyone could have finished them and give permanent ratings!)
Blue Sweater Story 
More Qwaser haet…and yet it is getting a second season. It must have been more popular in Japan.
I’m glad to see Tatami Galaxy and Nodame coming in higher than before.
It’s good to know that ANN and AniDB are closer than I thought ratings wise. Like you I had always held ANN up to be the gold standard but with this info it means I can look more seriously at AniDB ratings.
The top 3 female series aren’t only shoujo they are boys love. So I would guess a high concentration of female anime fans are into shounen ai. I’m sure there are probably a number into purer shoujo shows like Kimi ni Todoke but I imagine the number is less than boys love fans. Though I am surprised Hetalia wasn’t on that list somewhere.
Haha, I did try to be as objective about Seikon no Qwaser when I was writing that knowing you would have some reaction to it! I’m just saying what the data said. Two sources giving it the lowest ratings is difficult not to notice and point out:) Is there any good anime rating site with primarily Japanese users that you know of? Will be interesting to see if Japanese people have different taste to those on ANN or AniDB. And yeah, sometimes certain anime just appeal to enough that it warrant a sequel, even though most people (on the internet posting at least) do no like it, while other series, Baccano! comes to mind, misses out on getting any sequel in the near future. What an unfair world:( Nodame Cantabile has also come very high in ANN rating. I just never did a standalone article for them.
Another thing I just remembered with regards to number of votes for ANN and AniDB is also that I collected ANN data back in January while AniDB was done only recently. For older series, this would not matter but I imagine for series in 2010, ANN’s data would have been slightly higher had I gone back to collect the most recent data (which I won’t do yet because it’s way too time-consuming!). Having said that, this can only bring the votes per title up and make it (from 202) and make it closer to AniDB’s number (483). The rating correlation between these two sources for the 2010 anime series is also pretty strong, at 72%.
You are right, Shoujo / shounen ai, I kinda generalized that a little bit in my original post. It was such a small sample at the beginning so I just group them together… Saying that, only Togainu no Chi is classified as Shounen Ai in there. With regards to hetalia: World Series, it is one of the series that I there was no information since it’s still ongoing so there is no permanent rating. But yes, you are right that there are more female than male (60% female) in the temporary vote section. FYI, Kimi ni TOdoke is 86% male
Two other rating sites would be MyAnimeList and AnimePlanet. MyAnimeList in particular has the highest number of people using it out of any rating site.To give you an idea, Angel Beats has 36246 votes, compared to the measly few thousand the others have
Thanks for the links to the two sites. That is very true about MyAnimeList. I just got around to collecting a few anime data from MAL the other day and realize its ratings definitely dwarf both ANN and AniDB by quite a margin. I am a little surprise the discrepencies in numbers are as big as they are! I still like AniDB’s rating since it has breakdown by demographic and gender which I don’t think any other rating sites have. ANN, that’s the first site I remember referencing so I naturally started off with that first. I will definitely try to do another comparison with of ANN and AniDB with MAL once I got around to getting all the data:)
I highly prefer AniDB’s ratings too… Not simply because of their system but I find the taste of the people voting and lurking the site relatively more compatible to mine in comparison to ANN, or even MAL.
I find your results highly amusing. This means even though some series targets the female population particularly Shoujo and Josei (ie Nodame Cantabile), the majority of the people who have their voices heard (or the votes) are still men. I think this means that the ratings for shoujo and josei animes could be inconsistent in the internet since we’re not really getting the votes from the perspective of those who should have watched the show, which are the women.
That is definitely something that I found very interesting when going through these results. Even for an average series, 80% of males still make up the voting! The results obviously have to be taken with a grain of salt because of the relatively small sample size but as far as I am concerned, it is still a useful indication of the genre that vote for these animes. It does at least show shoujo team to have higher share of female voters, which is a good sanity check that the results still is valid, within reason. I can’t actually think of any other database that might give an additional perspective on how many female watch anime shows though, can you?
Personally, I still have not figured out yet which websites actually have the most compatible taste to me. I am still at the beginning stage of collecting data from MAL and haven’t gotten to 50% of data from AniDB yet. A lot of the time with these systems, it is good enough to find ones that maps you the best regardless of whether other people think so or not! Glad you found yours:)
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Thank you so much! Very nice of you to stop by and leaving me a comment:)